Taming the new 900hp Lamborghini beast

The new Lamborghini Temerario, which replaces the Huracán, is meant to be the Italian marque's junior model, the "starter" car in the Lambo line-up. But someone forgot to tell Lamborghini because, by every metric, the Temerario is a no-holds-barred supercar.

- Edric Pan

LISBON - The new Lamborghini Temerario, which replaces the Huracán, is meant to be the Italian marque's junior model, the "starter" car in the Lambo line-up. But someone forgot to tell Lamborghini because, by every metric, the Temerario is a no-holds-barred supercar.

Take its 907hp output, which is in another league from the 630hp Huracán, and a whopping 90hp and 167hp more than the Temerario's most obvious rivals, the Ferrari 296 GTB and McLaren 750S respectively.

That mind-boggling power figure comes courtesy of a clean-sheet, Lambo-developed 4-litre twin-turbo V8 boosted by a trio of 110kW axial-flux electric motors - one on each front wheel and the third between the mid-mounted engine and rear-mounted gearbox.

The Temerario is a plug-in hybrid and shares the same hybrid hardware - electric motors and 3.8kWh battery pack - as its V12-engined Revuelto big brother. Should you wish, you can run this supercar for up to 10km on just its front electric motors.

The engine alone serves up a huge 789hp, but Lamborghini is even prouder of the fact that it revs to a stratospheric 10,000rpm - beyond the reach of any peer. Not even Honda, at the peak of its fabled VTEC era, dared to spin a road-car engine to these crank speeds.

Among other things, that insane rev limit is enabled by the use of a flat-plane crankshaft, titanium conrods and finger-follower valvetrain.

It warms the enthusiast's heart to hear Lamborghini's chief technical officer, Dr Rouven Mohr, declare that such high revs were not, in fact, necessary for the engine to hit its performance targets - from around 7,000rpm, it is already close to its peak output.

But Lambo wanted to enthral the driver with a "continuing crescendo" of ballistic urge, and to imbue the engine with the character of a horizon-chasing, racecar-like powerplant.