Still a bit of a mystery how I managed to get a chair at the Lambo high table, but hey, pass the CO2 and wolf whistles. Three cars, three journos, a trip from Olivers to Graskop along the 'widowmaker' and back, with a stop at Elephant Whispers in Hazyview to pet an elephant named Tembo. There was to be a helicopter flip over the Blyde River Canyon but the weather came over all Welsh, so, bleak house, had to drive back with the roof down through the deep purple. What a disappointment...
Annie was right - sweet dreams.
The cars themselves - LP 560-4, LP 560-4 Spyder and LP 570-4 Spyder Performante - are all well into their model life, still fantastic to look at, still difficult to crawl out of. Gallardo is a Bolognese fighting bull and LP refers to the engine's location (longitudinally in the posterior). The 540 is the crazy kilowatt output and the 4 is the all wheel drive nomenclature.
On the boil it is the devil in pursuit of fallen souls, a guttural howl to freeze the blood. In a tunnel, flappy paddling down a couple of gears, it's seat wetting. And when young Greg tore up the road's magnificent cambers, dodging the front-end loaders, all was perfect.
Truthfully they're not as easy to drive in traffic as Pearl franchise owner Hilton Ralph would have you believe, the gearbox the main culprit. Set up as it is for hard-nosed, lairy, full throttle runs it takes a while to learn its foibles. In town, especially at stop streets, it's easy to catch the 6-speed auto box out, the result a heafty thunk. Still, I'm comparing it to a VW DSG. Compared to the old days of neutral before reverse and massive knocks between gears, it's a pussy. Performance is admirably eeek; 0-100 km/h in 3.4 seconds and 325 km/h in soft top Performante guise (with that nasty bit of sticky-outy carbon fibre whale-tail wing that costs R110 000).
