DANCES WITH BULLS

Lamborghini has made the already weapons-grade Urus even more potent

- Pablo Chaterji

It's a hot, windy day near Nandi Hills, outside Bengaluru. There's an FIA Grade 2 racetrack in front of me, except that it hasn't been completed, so it's effectively a huge flat-track raceway at the moment. This would be the perfect environment for a small, light rally-spec hatchback, so naturally the car that I'm sitting in is the Lamborghini Urus Performante, a super-SUV that weighs well over two tonnes and is over five metres long and two metres wide; it's burbling away menacingly at idle and being quickly covered in red dust, being blown in from the track. In its cabin, I'm ensconced in sporty luxury and very welcome air-conditioning, while pro racer Ishaan Dodhiwala, in the passenger seat, runs me through some do's and dont's, the gist of which is have fun and don't crash.' The Urus' Tamburo' drive controller is set to Rally, which is new for the Performante this mode dials down the ESP's limits, and tells the torque-biasing rear diff to send more grunt to the rear wheels. You'll be surprised at what this thing can do in Rally mode', says Dodhiwala. Only one way to find out, then I floor it (record scratch) But first, a bit about the Urus Performante. The regular Urus (for lack of a better word) isn't exactly a shrinking violet, with a whopping great 4-litre V8, 641 worth of the finest thoroughbreds and a 0-100 kph time of 3.2 seconds. Why, then, did Lamborghini see fit to take one of those, give it 16 more bhp, slice 47 kg off its kerb weight and make it wider and lower? I haven't the faintest idea, but I suspect that it's one way to keep interest alive in what is the firm's most popular car by a country mile; the Urus has comfortably outsold its flashier stablemates from the day it was introduced in 2017, in a trend seen with every manufacturer of both supercars and SUVs (with the Purosangue upon us, I don't think it'll be too long before Ferrari's sales charts go the same way).