The bad news is the Huracan will soon be no more; the good news is the last supercar variant shall be the greatest

Natural selection, Darwin famously said, is but the “the preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations,” evolution nothing more than “the life and death of the more or less successful individuals.” Perhaps livescience.com synopsizes it better, noting “individuals with traits that enable them to adapt to their environments survive and have more offspring,” which, in turn, “will inherit those traits.” More bluntly put, Darwinism means weeding out the weak to make a species stronger.

The famed British naturalist may have focused all his attentions on the animal kingdom, but evolution applies to machine just as well as it does mammal, the continuous advancement of that which we make as immutable as the evolution of the living. Of course, mechanical transformation is a lot quicker than Darwin’s gradualism, it being a lot easier to add a camshaft to a cylinder head — or replace the entire engine with a battery — than to wait for a fish to develop lungs so it can walk on dry land.

But the theory remains the same. The latest generation of anything will be more advanced, even if often only minutely, than that it replaces. It is also axiomatic — or, at least, it most certainly should be — that the last of any species, be it animal or mechanical, should also be its most advanced.

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That’s certainly true of Lamborghini’s latest Huracan. Not only is it the latest from Lamborghini, but it will also be the last purely ICE-powered supercar Sant’Agata Bolognese ever engineers. Yes, I know that, strictly speaking, the Tecnica will not be the last new gas-fueled Huracan, the company scheduled to announce something called the “Sterrato” at Miami’s Art Basel in December. But it’s some kind of weird, knobby-tired off-roader — think of the Huracan given the Audi all-road treatment — that will be many things, including, I suspect, a huge sales success. But a supercar it’s not.

In other words, the car in these pages — and which I just recently thrashed around Spain’s diabolical Circuito Ricardo Tormo — will be the very last gasoline-fueled Huracan supercar.

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And the Tecnica is purely a product of Darwinian selection, Victor Underberg, Lamborghini’s director of whole vehicle development, quite literally picking the most favourable of Huracan ‘variations’ and melding them into this one final tribute to Italian internal combustion. In essence, the Tecnica is the very best of the RWD EVO civility; melded with the technical genius that is the latest Huracan STO.

That means, in this one (final) package, you get the Super Trofeo Omologata’s top-line high-revving 631-horsepower version of Lambo’s now-trademark 5.2L V10, along with its aerodynamic nous, mated to the very latest of Lamborghini’s Dinamica Veicolo Integrata and the rear-wheel steering from the latest EVO. The package, if you listen to Underberg, promises the practical road manners of the EVO and most, if not quite all, of the race-proven track-worthiness that is the top-of-the-line STO.

And the Tecnica delivers. Completely. Totally. Almost without compromise and in pretty much every regard.

Of course, it’s fast. Six-hundred-and-thirty-one horsepower motivate but 1,379 kilograms, which means Tecnica hits 100 kilometres an hour in just 3.2 seconds from a stop, and, given its head, will touch 325 km/h (thanks to reduced drag, that’s actually 10 klicks faster than the race-ready STO). It also sounds the part. Put the ANIMA in Sport Mode, and you’ll find the Huracan holding every gear to its 8,000-rpm power peak is intoxicating. Perhaps it’s not quite the event that the Aventador’s V12 might be, but with most supercars already succumbing to turbocharging, a naturally-aspirated V10 is definitely something to cherish, especially if it’s right behind your right ear.

And yet, despite sitting at the top of the Huracan’s performance hierarchy, the Tecnica has the most coddling ride of any Lamborghini I have ever tested. Yes, I know that no one buys a Huracan, much less a super-sporty Tecnica, for its ability emulate a Lexus. But the fact that it does a fair job of imitating an LC500 over cobblestones and potholes points again to the incrementalism that is automotive evolution. In this case, it was Underberg and his minions discovering that, by futzing with the compression damping of their electronically-adjustable magneto-rheological shock absorbers, they could reduce the stiffness of the Tecnica’s springs. Presto, change-o, Lamborghini re-invented as the most civilized of supercars.

More important to this survival of the (supercar) fittest is that the Tecnica is also amazingly adept on the track. For one thing, it eschews the EVO’s lesser variable-rate active steering box — great for parking-lot manoeuvring, but not so great for supercar-speed stability — for the STO’s fixed-rate setup. Take my word on this, diving into Ricardo Tormo’s high-speed Aspar corner hard on the brakes at well over 200 kilometres an hour, you’ll be thankful for every bit of fingertip feedback that fixed-rate steering promises.

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On the other hand, having the ability to steer the rear wheels really helps the Tecnica flick through Valencia’s tricky curva 9-10-11 switchbacks. Underberg says that the having the wheels steer as much as 3.5 degrees in the opposite direction to the fronts effectively shaves 220 millimetres off the Huracan’s wheelbase. That would, were those 220-mils real, give the Tecnica about the same wheelbase as a Lotus Evora, and make a Huracan barely 75-mm longer than a Mazda MX-5. I don’t know how real that simulated shortening of wheelbase is, but I do know it makes such easy work of the Ricardo Tormo’s Mick Doohan hairpin.

The real magic, however, has been the evolution of Lamborghini’s recalibrated Dinamica Veicolo Integrata dynamic control system. The heart of everything electronic in the Huracan, LDVI controls the Tecnica’s torque-vectoring rear differential, the aforementioned magneto-rheological adaptive dampers and, most especially, a recalibrated performance traction control system.

The Tecnica is purely a product of Darwinian selection, Lamborghini quite literally picking the most favourable of Huracan ‘variations’ and melding them into this one final tribute to Italian internal combustion

One of the very best such systems extant, the control that the LDVI offers we of ham-fisted steering is truly incredible. Switch the ANIMA to Sport, for instance, and LDVI liberates all manner of tail-wagging oversteer, the Tecnica ready to hang out its rear like the very best of drifters. In fact, the Tecnica’s Sport mode is my new favourite combination of supercar silliness — that would be making mincemeat of the super-gummy 305/30R20 Bridgestone Potenzas — while still promising those of us lacking a FIA racing license that said oversteer will not be terminal. It takes some adjustment — hammering the throttle on a $279,630 supercar while cornering on the limit does take some getting used to — but Lambo’s LDVI is so trustworthy that even the faint of heart can play Max Verstappen without (too much) fear of becoming one with the gravel trap. Or worse, the guardrail.

Making this all work in harmony is some dramatically revised aerodynamics — the Tecnica boasts 35 per cent more downforce than the EVO while simultaneously reducing drag by some 20 per cent — along with some seriously powerful 380-millimetre carbon ceramic discs clamped by some hefty six-piston Brembo calipers. If you’re a true track demon, there are also Bridgestone Potenza track tires — 245/30R20 in front, and those huge 305/30R20s in the rear — that make the standard summer performance versions feel like hockey pucks.

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But, like so much of the Tecnica, the devil is not in such details, but rather the gradual evolution of virtually every technology that goes into making this Huracan the super-est of supercars. Indeed, the real revelation of the new Tecnica is that, now that we can start to look back on Huracan history, it gives us the ability to appreciate how completely it has been transformed since its introduction eight short years ago. When it was introduced in 2014, the Huracan was soggy, underdamped, and so prone to understeer it might have been a Toyota Camry. And still it rode like a buckboard.

The Tecnica, on the other hand, is miles faster, handles like it should be racing the GT3 class at Le Mans, and somehow manages to ride better to boot. Darwin may be most famous for his reference to the survival of the fittest, but, perhaps the true essence of On the Origin of Species is that “it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent—it is the one most adaptable to change.”

That pretty much describes the Huracan Tecnica.

Students of Darwin will no doubt be ready to put pen to paper to tell me that the engineering of a car is not a true example of natural selection but rather the “artificial selection” typified when breeders deliberately mate the smartest and strongest of their stock. They would be right. I’d counter, though, that there is something if not quite natural, then at least organic about the way the Huracan has grown from a rich boy’s plaything into the most complete of all Lamborghini supercars.

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