W215 Huracán '15

While I've come to feel little more than downright disdain toward the vast majority of Italian cars we've tested here in Car of the Week, even someone like me can't help but to find the Nyanborghini Purracan irresistibly cool. The story goes that Canadian musician deadmau5 wrapped his Ferrari 458 Italia with a Nyan Cat livery, going as far as to replace the Ferrari badges on the car with Purrari badges. Now, of course, Ferrari being Ferrari, fiercely protective of their brand image, quickly C&Ded the man, in doing so causing more damage to their image than any pair of pixelated rainbow–farting cats could. And so what's a rich man to do in this trying situation but to buy a Lamborghini and wrap it in the very design that Ferrari was so vehemently against?

https://youtu.be/kAuQJj40PJs

In essence, I think the Nyanborghini Purracan is the single coolest Lamborghini, at least in modern history, because it embodies the very spirit and sentiment that gave rise to Lamborghini as a car manufacturer to begin with: to do what Ferrari won't with a firm middle finger raised. And yes, in case you haven't figured it out by now, this livery is the entire reason why I bothered to choose an Italian car to begin with. I mean, I spent all this time making a livery for my own use, I might as well give myself the chance to actually like the car as a whole, right?

deadmau5 Nyanborghini Purracan by XSquareStickIt livery link (GTS | GT7)

Even before it gets wrapped up in feline shenanigans though, the base Huracán looks really promising on paper! It's brash styling masks a deceptively tiny car, one that can somehow house what I consider to be the idea drivetrain layout for a sports car: a big, but not too big, high revving NA engine mounted rear midship sending power to all four wheels via a close ratio 7 speed gearbox. With the blessing of Audi, this combination of the perfect drivetrain and diminutive body proved wildly successful both in sanctioned racing and production peacocking, with the Huracán GT3 scoring wins at Monza, Daytona, and Laguna Seca, and the Performante holding the (rather pointless...) Nordschleife lap record at one point. It seems to me that, despite the Huracán being the "baby Lambo", the flagship Aventador is only for showboating and reskinning into various other overpriced models, whereas the Huracán is the work bull of the brand that gets called upon when things actually need to get done. While usually the flagship car of a brand represents the very best and distilled essence of a manufacturer, it seems to me that we are yet to give modern Lamborghini a fair chance at an impression here in COTW until we've sampled its darling baby, the Huracán.

Even within the confines of Gran Turismo Sport, a game which ruthlessly distills away any sense of speed from the player, the Huracán is properly "HOLY BALLSACKS" fast in a straight line, even without feeling the g forces, motion blur, or camera pullbacks of going 0–100km/h in 3.2 seconds on its default Sport Hard tyres. Hell, 0–100 feels too shallow a test for the Huracán, because this thing just does not stop pulling until 180km/h at the top of 4th gear. That's right—this 601HP supercar from 2015 feels like it has the first four gears of a 1999 Impreza with well over double the power of a 1999 Impreza, and ripping through 4 whole gears within 9 seconds, each time upshifting as near to the height of the NA V10's stratospheric 9,000rpm redline as one can manage, is just as ridiculous as you can imagine it being. Now, of course, I've sampled cars that pull way harder, from hybrid LMP1s to EV performance cars, but you grow to expect such savagery in a racing machine and harmonise with it, and EVs have none of that drama, surprise, and involvement that the Huracán possesses. By contrast, the Huracán is savagely involving without ever letting you get too comfortable with it, because once you reach fifth gear on a racetrack where it mellows out just a little bit, you'll have other "HOLY BALLSACKS" things to worry about.

Those being the brakes.

For some weird reason, even on the default and strongest ABS setting, the Huracán's front tyres will be pushed to their absolute limit under full braking, even on a dry, level, and smooth racetrack, with whatever road legal compound you fit on them persistently chirping and squealing just with the brakes alone. This of course means that the front tyres have next to nothing left to actually turn the car when the time comes, meaning that you have to come off the brakes almost entirely for this rear mid engined supercar to even start considering biting into a corner. The news isn't much better on corner exits, either, where the front tyres will lift and gasp for air as though they had been forcibly held underwater and asphyxiating the whole time, which doesn't feel too far from the truth. The braking issue might be remedied by shifting brake bias backwards towards the rear, but since a Brake Balance Controller is an aftermarket part in GT7, I don't much want to fiddle with it back here in GTS, since, you know, we're supposed to be testing cars stock.

What this all translates to is that the front tyres are always at their limits around a track, and as such, they are also the limiting factor in everything that you do. Aside from off–track whoopsies, the rear end of the car just doesn't feel alive at all, like a dead carcass just along for the ride like an FF hatch, and I never once had to apply any counter steer in my time with the Huracán. The front tyres being constantly overworked and at their limit in any situation also means that the baby bull is a very "one thing at a time" car; you're either braking or turning, not both at the same time. You're either turning or accelerating, not both at the same time. While "one thing at a time" can be great life advice for some, especially for those suffering with anxiety, it's a pretty awful ethos for a brash, shouty, hard accelerating rear mid engined supercar, for whom the pace is often set by the track and the cars around it rather than its driver. Overall, its cornering prowess, or lack thereof, feels completely disproportionate to its straight line bursts, and after a while, it just feels like I as a driver have to fight the car at literally every turn to get it to... turn.

Some might argue that the whole point of a Lamborghini is that you have to fight it a little to prove your worth as a driver, but because the Huracán never really threatens to actually kill you by spinning out or flipping over, fighting it just to get it to turn like a car ought to feels less like a testosterone filled fight to prove your worthiness against a feral beast and more annoying like trying to get your bratty kid to do their homework. I don't know about you, but if I want to feel like a disgruntled dad, I'd have bought a Honda Shuttle, not a Lamborghini Huracán.

To be entirely fair, the Huracán can corner, it just has a lot of "safety understeer" baked into how its set up, erecting a gargantuan barrier the driver has to overcome each time they attempt to take a corner at speed with the Huracán, making everything else about the car hard to appreciate when then understeer takes priority and dominates your every thought on the racetrack. It'd be too easy to blame Lamborghini's overbearing parents, Audi, for that understeer and the perceived safety said understeer brings, but really? Lamborghinis have been understeering like a house in a landslide without anything resembling a paddle even as far back as the 25th Anniversary Countach. Plus, I took a 2009 Ferrari 458 Italia to race against the Huracán on race day, and to my utmost surprise, the two cars drive almost identically, with a nose that is wont to lift, and the entire experience dominated by "safety understeer". It's a trait that is shared with most, if not all of the modern supercars I've tested here in Car of the Week thus far, from the 2017 Ford GT to the Aston Martin Vulcan.

And so I find myself at an awkward impasse in writing this review, because I don't know what conclusion I can come to for the Huracán. I don't know if it's a good car relative to its contemporary peers or not, because they all blend together seamlessly to offer the same driving experience of "much power, such understeer, wow". It doesn't matter what engine they have, how much they weigh, what they look like, or what their drivetrain layouts are; if they all drive the same, none of them have a distinct trait or a personality of their own that set them apart from the next car. If not for my Nyan Cat livery and the real life story behind it, the Huracán would feel like a 458 clone in this game. I may not like these cars, but from an objective standpoint, are they good? Which would I recommend over the other and why? I can't answer that at all.

Fortunately, I have some friends that sometimes make my desk job easier for me... by making my job on the racetrack way harder.

Here at Car of the Week, I'm not the only one with a darling Porsche I like to whip out unsolicited at every opportunity; Vic has a dung beetle coloured 991 911 GT3 RS he likes to sashay around from time to time, and the last race of the day at Suzuka was one such occasion. On paper, you'd think Vic was sending his Beetle to the Slaughter: it's a whole 110HP down on the Huracán, and while normally only 2kg (4lbs) lighter than the Huracán if you can believe any statistic the Italians give you about their cars, Vic had a few more scones and Earl Greys just before the race to get his car and driver combo to meet the minimum mass requirement of 1,422kg (3,135lbs), the mass of the Huracán according to this game. Also, remember the part where I said that I consider rear mid engine all wheel drive to be the ideal drivetrain for a sports car? The 911's RR layout is easily the worst layout ever mass produced, putting aside forklifts. So can anyone please explain to me HOW THE HELL I got utterly destrolished and humiliated by the 991 during the "race" at Suzuka?

First, Vic gave the whole field a 5 second head start. He then overtook everyone else in the race before hunting me in my Purracan down for the lead. The whole ordeal didn't take him too long, and by the midway point of lap 2, the dung beetle was already getting a very strong whiff of the distinct odour of cat poo. He then decided to start a smoke show by drifting and sliding around, before casually overtaking me at his leisure.

So what the hell happened?

My guess is that Porsche actually made a sports car that can actually handle, when everybody else was too preoccupied with "protecting" their drivers and clientele. Porsche made a car that's meant to be driven, whereas everybody else was obsessed with making trophies on wheels. Porsche will actually let you have your car and play with it too, and they didn't even have to lie about their mass figures to beat some cheaters. Above all else, Porsche has shown me that other car makers have no excuse to not do better; they just choose not to. Armed with that context, I can now confidently tell you that the Huracán is a bad car... at least, in base LP 610-4 form.

Yes. Yes, I'm aware that it's perhaps unfair to the Huracán that we ran the base model against a track focused, hardcore 911 GT3 RS. Perhaps a Performante or an STO would've been a fairer comparison, but oh would you look at that, we only get one road going Huracán, and it's the base model. How convenient.

Even when I actively try to like them, Italian cars just make me mad without fail.

W216 Lexus RC F Gr.4

The RC F Gr.4 is what you get when you throw good parts onto a bad car.

It has phenomenal brakes. It's arbitrarily blessed with a 7 speed gearbox in the same category where Corvettes and NSXes have only 6 speeds. The suspension soaks up bumps and kerbs to the point where they almost aren't felt. The tyres on this car actually feel properly aligned; a rarity in this game. They'll bite on trail braking and corner entry, and the inside tyres aren't the first to give up mid turn. Plus, slides in this car can even be easily corrected with just a flick of counter steer. Hell, I even recall at one point in the game's life when the powers that be blessed the RC F with OP straight line speed. Unfortunately, all that is thrown at a fat, ugly car with a half assed prototype interior and a lopsided 54:46 weight distribution, largely owed to having a hulking 5.0L V8 up front.

The end result is as mixed a bag as they come. Due to the Gr.4 RC F being based on the 2016 RC F GT3 prototype, it not only shares the awkward interior still featuring an out of place clock, but it also inherits the prototype's even more awkward 2nd to 3rd gear shift, which makes the car feel like it choked on its own engine oil. With the gears that close and an engine that peaky, you'll be making that shift many times across several tracks. But, just like the RC F GT3, the RC F Gr.4 is a very neutral, stable, and predictable drive otherwise, one that earns and begets a reckless amount of trust from its driver, and shouldn't require too much time to get to know. The front end bites in wonderfully on corner entry, so much so that the rear end starts hinting at a slide in the tighter turns, helpfully rotating the car as a whole into a corner, and the car even puts down power really well for an FR. But, on the flipside, it does struggle a little with high speed sweepers owing to the heavy front end, and you'll have to make the front tyres scream slave labour to squeeze that cornering prowess out of them. I like my RC F Gr.4 with -1 front brake bias for that extra biting edge into a corner, but I suspect for longer races, that will have to get knocked back a bit to even out the tyre wear front to rear.

I'm tempted to say that the RC F Gr.4 is a good all rounder, a jack of all trades that you can default to if you had to pick a manufacturer for a season for which you're unsure of what lies ahead. The reason I can't say that is that, despite the GT3 cars fitting the bill and the Gr.4 car handling well, the latter is just SAH-LOOOOOOW in practice; I recall Vic of all people driving his RC F Gr.4 being harassed by my Cayman GT4 around Nürburgring GP during Week 205 when we tested the 86 Gr.4. The RC F just couldn't compare to the mid engine menace in the corners, and it's not like it pulled away at all in the straights, partially due to the slipstream it was providing the Cayman. That doesn't sound like much of a knock against the RC F in writing, until you realise that the Cayman is one of, if not the slowest car in Gr.4 with BoP applied in a hot lap scenario; it has much less power and weighs so much more than the RC F with BoP applied. It's essentially a 5 speed toy going up against a 7 speed Kaijuu. That such a thing can more than harass the RC F around a track then, is as atrocious as saying a paintball gun has the same stopping power as an AR-15. Why is the RC F so slow? HOW can it be this slow with those numbers and that good a driving feel?

To be more thorough in my test, I ran the Cayman against my peers mostly running RC Fs this week, and I overtook them all within two laps of Willow Springs before setting the fastest lap of the race. I might have thrown the entire race away, but don't let that distract you from HOW FREAKING SLOW the RC Fs were. It's almost like the "F" in RC F stands for "failure".

It made for some tremendous one–make races, but the RC F is proof that, to make a good race car, it's better to start with a good base that requires minimal work than to throw expensive parts at a bad base.

W214 Mini Cooper S '05

Very rarely even for those who drive many different cars for a living, they will come across that one car that just completely breaks every preconception of how things should be, what can reasonably be expected of a car or a category, and in doing so, unearths every yard stick in their mind, with every car they drive henceforth having to be measured against that new standard, spoiling that blessed person beyond any mere mortal's conception. A Lotus Elise's steering feel, for example. A Porsche Taycan's acceleration, or even a Honda Fit's packaging. When it comes to the way an FF sports car drives, the car that blew my overstimulated, desensitised sim racer mind and spoiled my cynical brain silly was the DC2 Honda Integra Type R, a car so magical that Honda themselves have never really replicated that magical feel all these years later.

I'm here to tell you that the DC2 ITR has itself been DC2 ITRed by the 2005 Mini Cooper S.

Just as vehemently as understeer usually dominates the experience of driving an FF sports car, the driving dynamics of the Cooper S is so unexpectedly fantastic that it could almost render irrelevant the fabled history of the Mini marque. You really needn't know any of the original Mini's successes in rally, how it revolutionised drivetrain packaging, or whether you can steer it from the roof to appreciate this modern Mini, because the R53 generation Cooper S does all the talking for itself without needing to rely on nostalgia when driven on the racetrack—not something many modern cars wearing old namesakes can lay claim to. Despite the sacrilege of being more than double the size of its forebearer, the Bayerische Mini Werke is, in my millennial eyes, in just that perfect sweet spot of both power and mass for a hot hatch; big enough to fit most, pack some grunt, and be seen and safe, but small enough to be chuckable, intuitive, and engaging to drive, before all the modern safety regulations and demand for insane power bloats and neuters cars to where they can no longer offer these sensation of an agile and responsive pocket rocket in the palm of your hand. Almost as if they knew they had to capitalise on that golden moment in history when such a car is possible, BMW fitted a supercharger onto the sporty version of the Cooper, the Cooper S, only for this generation of Coopers, making this week's car a special standout even in the long, ever growing history of Minis.

...which makes the peculiar omission of the supercharger whine in Gran Turismo Sport all the more sorely missed. This 2005 Mini Cooper S has been with the Gran Turismo series since 2010's Gran Turismo 5, but it took Polyphony Digital twelve years to finally give the Cooper S its supercharger whine in 2022's Gran Turismo 7, giving the quirkily styled car a personality to match. Here in GTS though, you'll have to make do with just the rather uninspired sound of the transversely mounted Tritec T16b4 inline four banger, though the extra 54 horses herded by the supercharger are all here and accounted for. The resultant 167HP (125kW) then goes through a close ratio 6 speed manual gearbox to the front wheels, another first for the now big boy, business meaning Mini, which can now bring its 1,180kg (2,601lbs) body up to 100km/h in somewhere around the 9.3 second mark on Sport Hard tyres.

As with any Mini, its acceleration isn't going to set anyone's pants on fire, not unless they had just jumped out of a burning Mazda Roadster. Even with all that gleaming and bespoke hardware, the R53 Cooper S only truly comes alive when it comes time for the supercharger to shut up and the Getrag gearbox to drop some gears. German this car may now be, but the R53 Cooper still embodies the spirit of a good David punching up against Goliaths with little power but much finesse, just as the Queen intended. Chuck this thing into a corner, and the car's four main strengths immediately become apparent, those being its diminutive body, light weight, incredibly direct and talkative steering, and some shockingly stiff 1.5Hz springs to prop it all up with. Despite the car not accelerating fast, the close ratios enabled by the 6 speed gearbox ensures that the engine can be kept screaming at all times, like it naturally wants to, making it sound and feel fast. Backed up by readily available responsiveness and some serious cornering speeds, the Cooper S is not only a serious track toy, but also one that never stops bombarding you with information and requests for your input, making it among one of the most engaging and technical drives I have ever driven here in GT Sport!

What that all translates to is that the car is so easy to learn and such a natural fit that it somehow skips the due process of feeling intuitive and jumps straight to feeling familiar, despite the fact that it was my first time helming one during race day, almost as if I met a younger, hotter version of my high school sweetheart I never knew she had. I'm usually someone who needs a few races to learn a car's idiosyncrasies before I can really bring it to my peers during race day, but in the Mini? I went at them hammer and tong from race 1! Despite our small group representing a range of driving abilities, most races ended up with about 6 cars all within three seconds of each other, a testament to how easy the Mini is to learn and how much it encourages close–knit tussles, a.k.a. the best kind of racecar, certainly better than Formula 1. More than inspiring immediate confidence, the way this car handles brings out the hooligan in every person. During race day, all I could think of were naughty thoughts, like, "Yeah, I can fit into that gap!" "Yes, I can take that hairpin at 120!*", and "hell yeah, I can take that gap in the hairpin at 120!*". I usually feel drained and tired at the end of our ~90 minute sessions, but the Mini gave me so much zest for life that I actually had a hard time winding down mentally after the session, wanting to drive it more! In other words, instead of draining me, driving the Mini somehow energises me!

*For legal reasons, these are exaggerations.

Drawbacks? Mostly just one if you can ignore the irony of an impractical hatch: The Cooper S, despite being the sporty variant of the Cooper, ironically still has an open differential, and it's an irony that will be at the forefront of the driving experience on the track that's quite literally impossible to ignore. It's not a super big deal on the Comfort Soft tyres the car comes default with in GT7, but in GTS where every car is slapped with Sport Hards, the extra lateral gs the car will gladly pull in the corners does transform the inside wheel into a Sports Hard mechanical eraser for road markings. Past the apex of a turn, you could be doing a middling 6,000rpm when you give the Cooper the beans, and well before the corner exit, you would have already smacked the limiter set at 7,000 several times, owing to the inside wheel spinning so fast and bringing the engine to the limiter, forcing a fuel cut and robbing the car of all momentum coming out of the turn. As an example, the car tops out at 172km/h in 4th gear, but you'll be smacking the limiter constantly while doing a mere 160km/h on Miyabi's centre section chicane, taken flat out. 12km/h (~7mph) doesn't sound like much in writing, but in a close ratio box mated to an engine that begs to be revved out and rewards the driver handsomely for doing so, it's completely counterintuitive that I have to take corner exits a gear higher simply to prevent the limiter from cutting in, which, while mechanically disadvantageous, does work out to be much faster. I don't even want to imagine this thing on anything other than the smooth, dry racetracks we ran. I mean, come on, an LSD isn't sorcery; Mazda can fit it on a Speed3 and a diesel Demio, why can't BMW on a sporty version of a sporty icon that has a history of winning dirt rallies and revolutionising drivetrain packaging?

Open diff or not, one thing for sure isn't open for interpretation: the R53 Cooper S is among some of the best FF cars you can drive in the game, even shaming some FR sports cars in the process; I genuinely think the R53 Cooper S is a better "traditional British recipe made better by foreigners" car than most Mazda Roadsters. As you can probably already guess with my heavy mentions of Mazda cars by this point, I'm a HUGE sucker for Mazdas, and so I hope it comes across how high a praise I mean it to be when I say I would rather a R53 Cooper S over most Roadsters. The supercharger of the Cooper S gives the car some real personality where the Roadster has none. Both cars heavily emphasise weight transfer and momentum driving, but the stiffer FF car won't kill you if you muck something up, whereas the softer FR car wouldn't hesitate to snap on you if you take liberties too far with it. In essence, I think a Roadster is more of a dance partner you have to respect, and a Mini is more of a toy you can just keep ragging on endlessly, and I don't care what it implies about me as a person that I prefer the toy over the dance partner. Short of the Japan–exclusive NR-A grade, a Roadster has never given me that serious liberating track toy feel before, and it'd need some serious bloat from a 2.0L engine just to share a track with this not–even–a–JCW Cooper.

Hell, I love it so much, it just might get my Car of the Year vote in a year where we tested the ND Roadster, S-FR, and R34 GT-R.