Lamborghini's wild new Temerario charts a new course for hybrid supercars

Globe and Mail

4 days ago

Stephan Winkelmann, the suave and impeccably dressed chairman of Automobili Lamborghini, doesn't suffer the slings and arrows hurled at his car company by the online commentariat. He doesn't have to, for the simple reason that Lamborghini is successful.
Under Winkelmann's leadership, the Italian firm enjoyed another record-breaking year in 2024, selling more than 10,000 vehicles. Lamborghini also raked in a record-breaking 834-million euros in operating profit from 3.09-billion in revenues.
While Winkelmann's bosses at Volkswagen Group must be happy, for now, it's his next move that will put his leadership to the test: launching Lamborghini into uncharted waters with the brand's first generation of hybrids.
The company, which has a tradition of naming car models after famous fighting bulls, is calling it 'Temerario,' which Winkelmann has said means 'fierce' and 'courageous.'
If the online chatter is any indication, car enthusiasts are fired up about it. After all, this is the House of the Raging Bull, Home of the Countach, Inventor of the Supercar – and you're telling me they're using ... batteries? The top comments on YouTube about the Temerario, successor to the best-selling Huracan as the brand's 'junior' supercar, lament that Lambo ditched its predecessor's pure V10 engine in favour of a four-litre V8 with two turbos, three electric motors and a battery pack.
The Temerario's price, starting at $432,490 in Canada, is roughly a 30-per-cent increase over the Huracan Evo. Add in all the carbon-fibre extras and the cost climbs well over half-a-million.
And yet, early sales show the car is already a success.
'For me, this is paramount: the fact that we have already one year of sales in our pockets is a sign of trust,' Winkelmann said.
He's not bothered by online critics and expects resistance to any change.
Winkelmann boasts the Temerario's new hybrid powerplant is unlike anything else on the market.
The all-new V8 and its two huge IHI turbos, each nearly the size of a soccer ball, produces 789 horsepower and 538 lb-ft of torque. Three axial-flux electric motors – one for each front wheel and one sandwiched between the engine and gearbox – combine for a total of 907 horsepower. Temerario easily outmuscles the old Huracan, not to mention key rivals such as the (admittedly less expensive) Ferrari 296 and McLaren Artura, both of which have V6 hybrids, or even the V8 McLaren 750S.
Peak power isn't even the Temerario's most impressive number; it's the engine's sky-high 10,000 revolutions-per-minute (rpm) redline. Its high-revving nature and linear power delivery are highly unusual for a turbocharged engine. On paper at least, it appears to behave more like a naturally aspired motor, more like the old V10.
At high rpm, turbos can become a drag on an engine, limiting airflow instead of boosting it. The solution is bigger turbos, big enough to feed eight cylinders with pistons sucking in air 83 times per second at 10,000 rpm. But , bigger turbos mean more lag, more time before their boost kicks in. That's where the Temerario's electric motors play a crucial role of filling the turbo lag.
The new V8 is twice as expensive to produce as the V10, even before you add the cost of all the electric motors and batteries, said Rouven Mohr, Lamborghini's chief technical officer.
Mohr, an avid amateur drifter and incurable car enthusiast with a 20-plus car collection to prove it, said the added cost is from the materials and complexity required for such a high-revving engine; titanium conrods, an exotic aluminum alloy engine block and finger-followers on the valvetrain. (Think race car stuff.)
Lamborghini's new engine didn't need to rev to 10,000 rpm, Mohr said. It could've got similar power from a cheaper, traditional low-revving turbo engine, where drivers ride a wave of low-end torque and shift up early – 'like a diesel,' Mohr said, but added that the engineers wanted a high-revving engine, 'not because of the figures, but because of the character and the emotions.'
Was his team's effort and Lamborghini's expense worth it? Is the commentariat wrong? Is this a new path forward for hybrid sports cars?
These were some of the questions going through my head while flying down the main straight at Estoril, an ex-Formula 1 racetrack in southern Portugal.
At around 200 kilometres an hour, there was time to take one hand and pry the helmet away from my ear to listen to the V8 soundtrack. It's not as loud or spine-tingling as the old V10, but it has a distinct buzzsaw howl from 7,000 rpm that crescendos at the redline. Vibrations from the flat-plane crank V8 rise through the seat and steering wheel. (That's on purpose; it required careful tuning of the car's all-new aluminum body structure.)
Somewhere north of 300 kilometres an hour, it's time to brake for the first corner. Brake by wire systems don't always feel natural – but this one does. The Temerario also feels unusually stable under hard braking for a mid-engine supercar. There's no typical wobble or sway from the rear tires; it's utterly planted. Something strange is going on here.
The car lurches out of the first corner with a split-second jolt of electric power before the turbo boost comes on strong. Instead of dropping off like a normal turbocharged engine, the power keeps building all the way above 9,000 rpm. It's only now that the manic, stomach-dropping reality of 907 horsepower in a 1,690-kilogram (dry weight) car becomes real. The 0-100 km/h figure of 2.7 seconds doesn't do it justice.
Strangest of all, however, is the supernatural way the car turns into corners, especially in Sport mode, which tries to ape the oversteery feel of a rear-drive car. (Corsa is more stable and less fun if you ask me.) The Temerario pivots into corners in a way that seems to defy physics; it's almost as if it's over-rotating, about to spin out, but doesn't. The light steering feel only exacerbates the sensation of extreme agility. It darts into corners, grips and rockets out, sometimes with a cheeky powerslide for good measure.
And then there's drift mode, which Mohr is unsurprisingly enthusiastic about. It's a fun new feature that will surely result in an uptick in smashed Lamborghinis. The company only trusted us to have six runs through a single corner at low-ish speed, but drift mode does what it says on the box. By the sixth run even I, a mere writer, was drifting this all-wheel-drive, 907-horsepower supercar with some fluidity, if not outright grace.
I would've kept at it all afternoon, but Lambo only gave us those six turns plus nine proper laps of Estoril to figure out this massively complex machine.
Mohr told me the strangeness I'm feeling – the unusually stable braking, the incredibly eager turn-in, the instant thrust out of corners – comes down to the benefits of electric motors and some clever in-house programming that unifies control of the car's many subsystems. The e-motors work each front wheel individually, speeding or slowing each as needed in real time. They stabilize the car under hard braking. The rear e-motor helps provide an instant kick and fills the turbo lag. The front motors help pull the car into corners, through clever use of torque vectoring by brake and/or by dragging an electric motor. They'll also propel the car in EV mode for a few kilometres.
We are – whether you like it or not – in the more-is-more era of fast cars.
Going for a simpler, less powerful, naturally aspirated hybrid powertrain wouldn't have worked.
'It would be a failure,' Mohr said.
Even if some enthusiasts might want that, he believes it wouldn't sell.
The new Temerario is an exciting first foray into turbo-hybrid territory for a Lamborghini supercar and we've only just scratched its surface here. It's not a totally natural or intuitive car, but rather a supernatural one. Its unique high-revving V8 is probably the best turbocharged engine I've driven. And, it's got the big power, bragging rights and wild looks that should appeal to Lamborghini's core clientele.
The writer was a guest of the automaker. Content was not subject to approval.
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