Lamborghini LB 837 prototype 2010 Review

Lamborghini LB 837 prototype

First Drive

I've never seen this before, and I'm not talking about the 315km/h on the prototype Lamborghini's speedo. It's also not the first time I've seen this sort of speed at night on the high line of the 10km bowl at Italy's Nardo proving ground.

But it is the first time I've seen a solid, foot-wide ball of blue flame sitting, hovering behind a car.

Plenty of fast cars pop out a spurt of flame now and again. You see racing cars do it all the time. It's usually unburnt fuel being spat out the back (or the side) on a downshift, so it's a fleeting thing.

Not here. I'm driving the second of three Lamborghini LP837 prototypes in Nardo, pulling the tallest of the all-new seven-speed gearbox's cogs, so I'm both the hunter and the hunted.

And it's up here that the astonishing ball of blue fire sits, constantly, behind the three exhaust pipes in the middle of the LP837's tail. It's like a fire without a fireplace, except hot enough to be blue and occasionally green, and I know the guy behind me has the same view.

Driving up here in the fast lane isn't as easy as it sounds, either, because time has been cruel to the Nardo bowl since its glory days of the 400km/h plus record runs of 15 years ago. Even Lambo's regular testers admit it is getting pretty dangerous on the high line and has a 'technical' speed limit of just 240km/h.

The headlights are strobing up and down the road on high beam as the nose of the Lamborghini is thrown up and down violently over concrete pimples you probably wouldn't notice at 100km/h. Yet at this speed, they become hits so violent that the front end's suspension is clanging into the bump stops and it takes extreme commitment to keep the multi-million dollar prototype up near the barrier.

We're out here well past midnight because it's the only time the big V12 Lambo can run without its camouflage -- and the airflow the LP837 generates at 300 is disturbingly cruel on slap-on camouflage parts.

Meantime the all-new V12 engine and gearbox are doing it easily; cruising on part throttle with plenty of gristle left and going a long way to justifying the claims of Lamborghini's Technical Director, Maurizio Reggiani, that it's a 350km/h-plus machine.

As impressive as the engine is, the gearbox is every bit its match. Lighter than the unit it replaces and now with seven speeds, the race-spec unit eschews double-clutch technology by running a twin-plate clutch and rips through gears faster than you can believe possible.

In its most-aggressive Corsa mode, the Independent Shifting Rod (ISR) gearbox bangs home the next gear with just a 0.05 second pause in the V12's fury. It's hardly worth worrying about the demise of Lamborghini's traditional open-gate chrome manual shift, because no human can get anywhere near its shift time with a manual 'box.

Unlike the only other gearboxes to get close to the Lamborghini's shift time (in Ferrari's F430 Scuderia and the 599 GTO), Lamborghini has made sure you can feel the shift, clanging each of them home with fury and a rich, metallic thump. But it's also a much better unit when you're trickling around at low speed and it's very good now in its most-relaxed setting, with the more-sophisticated computer controls allowing it to slide open and closed more gently than previous systems.

The other big difference, besides the containment of all its oil and hydraulic lines within the case's casting, is that Lamborghini broke up the traditional gear pairings (one-two, three-four for example) so it could simultaneously disengage one while it was engaging the other. And it works superbly.

But there's no escaping that monster V12. No larger than the one it replaces, it's all new with eight scavenge pumps in its dry sump, a massively oversquare bore-to-stroke ratio to lower the piston speeds and it's lighter than the old motor by around 20kg.

It's not the technology we're here for. It's how much we can throw at the car and have it keep going. And you can throw plenty. Prototypes are normally fussy things, with bits and pieces hanging off them where the boffins plug in any number of sensors or cut holes in things randomly to get at sensitive areas. Not these three.

All carbon-fibre below decks, the LP837s feel immensely strong from the second you climb into them. The ride quality is brilliant, especially given that there is no electrically adjustable suspension and that the single-rate, pushrod suspension system has been taken directly from racing.

It's also quiet when you want it to be -- maybe a little too quiet -- but it's absolutely brutal and manic when you attack the throttle in either the Sport or Corsa modes.

In production, it will rev to 8250rpm, but these ones don't hit the limiter until 8500 -- except the older yellow one that is limited to 7800. Were it not for the limiters, they all feel like they'd burst past 9000 without a complaint.

A lot of the warbles and inconsistencies in the Murcielago's engine are gone, replaced by a beautifully linear, brutally hard bellow that turns into a full-blooded scream at high revs.
And it punches. Hard. With around 515kW (700hp) the LP837 attacks its redline willingly and often, but more importantly, it's geared up for fabulous accuracy and subtlety to the driver's right foot.

It is astonishingly adjustable mid-corner in any gear, at any speed. You can feather the throttle just a touch and you can easily, repeatedly ask for the difference between 7459rpm and 7467. It might not have direct injection, but you can't argue with the results.

If sound and fury is how you like your supercars, the LP837 won't disappoint. If you like your supercars super dangerous in their handling, then you should look elsewhere. No other supercar will be as easy to drive fast as this one.

On Nardo's 6.2km handling circuit that has tricky, tightening 240km/h corners, double-apex, fourth-gear bends and airborne crests mid-corner, the LP837 prototypes quickly build your confidence then do everything they can to retain it.

The front end communicates beautifully, with its race-bred suspension attached directly to a carbon chassis that is twice as stiff as the Murcielago's tube-frame design. The back end never feels like it will unglue in the ultra-dangerous, high-speed corners... It's exactly the opposite of the Murcielago.

Instead, it is composed, it is smooth and it feels infinitely adjustable. When you run it out of grip at the front, the steering tells you a long way before, then gently falls into a lighter state until it regains all its grip again. The rear end will step out only with everything switched off and with extreme provocation from the driver.

It will happily drive on understeer or, in the Sport or Corsa modes, mild oversteer and, in fact, it's at its best when the driver picks it up and throws it at a corner with just a trace of oversteer before picking up the throttle again.  That way, the new Haldex IV all-wheel drive system instantly flits torque around the car and eradicates understeer -- letting all four Pirellis do their best to rip the stones out of the tarmac, then firing out the next straight with an urgency that few humans have felt from a production car.

No other supercar feels this integrated -- and this is a prototype. It is so easy to drive, quickly or slowly, that it basically eradicates the direct, physical threat you felt every time you stepped into a Murcielago, but it's no less an event for it.

Finished it will be around the 1450-1500kg mark, but it feels lighter than that, probably because the chassis is so stiff that it does everything you ask of it with an almost-intuitive directness.

This carbon fibre tub weighs just 147.5kg and the entire body-in-white is 229.5kg, but it boasts an astonishing 35,000Nm/degree torsional stiffness, and that's the key here.

Inside, the prototypes were unfinished, but promise a high, wide central tunnel, a much-straighter driving position and a lot of the designs hinted at with the Reventon project.

Lamborghini engine data
Engine L537 (LP640) -- L539 (LP837)
Weight     253kg   --       235kg
Comp. ratio 11.1   --      11.8:1
Capacity   6495.7cc  --   6498.5cc
Power    640hp     --        700hp
@ rpm    8000rpm    --     8250rpm
Torque    660Nm      --    690Nm
@ rpm    6000rpm    --     6000rpm
Bore spacing   95mm   --   103.5mm

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