Clarkson Crowns the Performante His 2018 Car of the Year
Jeremy Clarkson, a man who drives more supercars in a calendar year than most dealerships sell, picked the Lamborghini Huracán Performante as his 2018 Car of the Year. He presented the award to Maurizio Reggiani, Lamborghini’s Board Director for Research and Development, at News Corp’s London headquarters during the inaugural motoring awards hosted by The Sunday Times and The Sun.
Clarkson’s reasoning is what makes this worth paying attention to. He did not cite a lap time, a power figure, or a styling detail. Instead, he described something closer to instinct:
“This is about the car that appealed more than anything. You get into it and you don’t know what it is that’s tingling the back of your head, but you think ‘this thing’s good’. There’s something about it: it’s not the speed, it’s not the looks. There’s only really been one car in the last twelve months where I’ve had that feeling, and that’s the Lamborghini Huracán Performante.”
That quote landed differently from the usual superlatives. Clarkson, who regularly writes motoring features for The Sunday Times and hosts Amazon’s The Grand Tour, built a career on being difficult to impress. He is generous with complaints and stingy with genuine praise. So when he isolates a single car from an entire year of driving and says the defining quality is something he cannot quite name, it tells you more about the Performante than any instrumented test could.
What Clarkson Was Actually Describing
Strip away the poetry and Clarkson was identifying the quality that separates good supercars from memorable ones: coherence. The Performante‘s individual numbers are impressive on paper, but rival machinery from Maranello and Woking could match or exceed them in isolated categories. What the Performante delivered was a car where every system seemed to speak the same language at the same time.
The naturally aspirated 5.2-liter V10 sits at the center of that sensation. According to one report, the engine produces 630 hp and 443 lb-ft of torque, delivering all of it with a linear, unfiltered response that turbocharging, by its nature, cannot replicate. Clarkson famously described the exhaust note as an escalating sequence from “a jackhammer” to “a latter-day V10 Formula One car at full chat.” The sound is not a byproduct; it is part of the engineering argument. A naturally aspirated engine at high revs communicates directly with the driver through throttle response, vibration, and acoustic feedback in a way that turbocharged competitors, however powerful, filter through boost curves and wastegate management.
Clarkson’s “tingling” was likely the sum of those inputs arriving simultaneously: the V10’s scream, the chassis loading up through the seat, the steering weighting precisely as the front axle bites. When a car coordinates all of that without any single element feeling synthetic or delayed, the driver’s subconscious registers it before the conscious mind can articulate why. That is coherence, and it is far harder to engineer than raw power.
Engineering the Intangible: How ALA Made the Performante Feel Alive
If the V10 provided the Performante’s voice, Lamborghini’s patented Aerodinamica Lamborghini Attiva, or ALA, gave it poise. The name doubles as the Italian word for “wing,” a characteristically Lamborghini touch of drama embedded in an engineering acronym.
The system integrates vents and ducts beneath the rear wing, under the car’s floor, and at the front, dynamically adjusting airflow by opening and closing those vents to optimize grip based on speed, cornering direction, and driver inputs. In high-downforce mode, the rear wing functions as a conventional fixed element, pressing the car into the tarmac. When conditions favor straight-line speed, channels through the wing open to reduce drag. The critical detail is that the rear wing’s two independent channels can operate asymmetrically, creating what Lamborghini calls aero vectoring: applying more downforce to the inside rear wheel during cornering to tighten the car’s line.
One source describes the ALA flaps activating in less than 500 milliseconds, managed by Lamborghini’s Piattaforma Inerziale (LPI), which governs all the car’s electronic systems in real time. Where a fixed-aero car forces the engineer to choose a compromise between straight-line speed and cornering grip, the Performante adjusts that balance continuously.
For the driver, this translates into confidence. The car feels planted in corners and unburdened on straights, and the transitions between those states happen without any perceptible step change. That seamlessness is almost certainly part of what Clarkson could feel but not articulate. The car does not announce its cleverness. It simply works, folding its complexity into the same coherent experience the V10 and chassis already provide.
Lighter, Sharper, Faster: The Performante’s Physical Argument
Active aerodynamics alone do not explain the Performante’s character. Lamborghini’s engineers also attacked weight with unusual aggression. One source notes that they reduced the car’s mass by 90 lbs through extensive use of forged carbon fiber, bringing the curb weight down to 3,493 lbs. Forged carbon fiber, a material Lamborghini helped pioneer for automotive applications, is lighter and more complex in its fiber orientation than traditional carbon-fiber layup, allowing engineers to create structural components with less material.
Combined with the V10’s output, the result is a power-to-weight ratio that makes the car feel urgent at every speed. Lamborghini states the coupé accelerates from 0 to 100 km/h in 2.9 seconds, with a top speed of 325 km/h. One report claims a 0-to-60-mph time of 2.6 seconds, which, if accurate, put the Performante squarely in the territory of cars costing twice as much when it launched.
Owners who track these cars regularly note that the Performante rewards commitment. It is not a car that flatters lazy inputs; it responds to precise ones with disproportionate reward. That distinction matters because it feeds directly back into Clarkson’s observation. The “tingling” he described is not something a numb, overly assisted car can produce. It requires the kind of transparent mechanical dialogue that only comes when weight is low, response is immediate, and nothing stands between the driver’s intention and the car’s reaction.
The Weight of an Endorsement: What This Meant for Lamborghini’s Brand
Awards from motoring journalists are common enough to be forgettable. What made Clarkson’s selection noteworthy was its reasoning. He did not choose the Performante because it was the fastest, the most expensive, or the most technologically advanced car he drove in 2018. He chose it because it made him feel something that nothing else did. For a brand that competes against Ferrari’s racing heritage and McLaren’s clinical engineering precision, that kind of subjective, emotional validation carries strategic weight that a Nürburgring lap record cannot replicate.
Lamborghini, historically, wins on spectacle and visceral engagement. The Countach did not need to be the best-handling car of its era; it needed to be the car that stopped traffic and rewired your nervous system. The Performante carried that tradition forward with genuine engineering substance underneath, and Clarkson’s endorsement confirmed that the substance and the spectacle were working in concert.
The timing also mattered. In 2018, the supercar market was deep into the turbocharging transition. Ferrari’s 488 family relied on a twin-turbo V8. McLaren’s lineup was entirely turbocharged. Lamborghini’s insistence on natural aspiration for the Huracán range looked, to some observers, like stubbornness. Clarkson’s award quietly reframed it as conviction. The Performante’s emotional immediacy was partly a consequence of that engineering choice, and having one of the world’s most influential automotive voices confirm it gave Lamborghini a marketing argument that no specification sheet could provide.
The Performante’s Place in Lamborghini’s Lineage, and What Comes Next
The Huracán Performante now occupies a specific and increasingly significant position in Lamborghini’s history. It proved active aerodynamics could enhance, rather than dilute, driver engagement. It defended natural aspiration against the turbo tide with results rather than nostalgia. And it spawned a lineage of increasingly focused variants: the rear-wheel-drive Performante Spyder, the track-oriented STO, the off-road-curious Sterrato, and the 10-unit farewell STJ that Car and Driver described as an “epic swan song.”
For buyers considering the Performante on the secondary market, Clarkson’s endorsement is worth remembering. One report indicated an original price of $274,390. Values for well-kept examples with low mileage tend to hold firm, partly because the Performante represents the last generation of mid-engine Lamborghini to rely exclusively on a naturally aspirated engine without hybrid assistance. The Temerario, its successor, pairs a twin-turbo 4.0-liter V8 with electric motors for a combined output that dwarfs the Performante’s figures. Whether it can replicate the Performante’s particular brand of unfiltered communication is the question Lamborghini’s engineers are working to answer.
Clarkson’s instinct about the Performante was, in retrospect, a verdict on an entire philosophy of building supercars. The car did not need to be the fastest or the prettiest. It needed to make the driver feel something irreplaceable. As Lamborghini moves deeper into hybridization with the Revuelto and Temerario, the Performante stands as the benchmark for what that intangible quality feels like when everything in the car is working toward the same emotional target. Matching those numbers will be straightforward. Matching that tingling sensation at the back of the head will be the real engineering challenge.
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