![]() Harnesses off, attach sucker, put on harnesses and realise that the key is actually in my jeans. I take the harnesses off and shut the door, put the harnesses on, programme the satnav, then realise that I now can’t reach the windscreen to attach the sucker. Once comfortable, I realise that with the harnesses on, I can no longer reach the door to shut it. I wiggle easily into the non-adjustable seat and then fit together the various pieces of harness jigsaw. Getting the picture?ġpm: Wake up, time for harness trouble.Īfter roughly 40 years of waiting, Charlie and Joe are finished doing whatever it is that people from the art department do, and it’s time to leave. ![]() The wheel is carbon fibre, wrapped in a fluffy Alcantara that feels identical to grasping a worn-through towelling bathrobe. Inside you sit on Alcantara-skinned carbon seats, right thigh resting on a carbon fibre transmission tunnel that houses a carbon fibre handbrake, looking at a carbon fibre dial set and pulling closed a carbon fibre door card with a lightweight, leather-tab handle. Most of the flat undertray is carbon fibre, as are the aforementioned sills, Venturi, air intakes and engine cover. Those black wheels are forged aluminium with titanium wheelnuts, saving 13kg. Let’s just whip through some of the dietary highlights. But then you look closer, and you see that Lamborghini’s got fantastically detailed with this car – probably because the standard Gallardo isn’t actually very porky in the first place. On casual acquaintance, pretty serious stuff, even if a lot of it is really racing jewellery rather than hardcore weight saving. If you prod various bits of the outside of the car, you discover that the engine cover is also carbon, and the clear bit in the middle turns out to be thin and wobbly polycarbonate, which also features as the material of choice for the side windows. It takes me a second to translate the heavily-accented English, and then I’m advancing on the SL with a boyish gleam and a very uncool grin plastered across my face. The man from Lamborghini hands me the key and simply says, “Ave foon". ![]() It has Superleggera stripes down the side, a 562bhp direct-injection V10 in the back and a quad of matt-black exhausts the size of storm drains. ![]() It has the ‘big wing’ option, black wheels, the Reventón’s chin. Squatting behind said doors is a new Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera, painted blazing yellow, wedge-shaped body parenthesised by black, carbon-fibre bits that stick out all over the place. At which point our day starts to look a damn sight brighter, in every sense that matters. Rubbish right up until we pull back the roller doors of the studio. The clouds are off-white, low and thick, heavy with implied resentment, a few desultory flakes of snow slowly spiralling to their inevitable deaths on the concrete. We arrive at a photographic studio on a grey and functional Bolognese industrial estate in the kind of weather that manages to siphon off positive emotions and leave you feeling depressed for no good reason. ![]()
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