The Demo Site

Maybe it was the perfect place for a Lamborghini Gallardo—about 5000 feet above Tenerife island in the Canary Islands off Morocco, where the winding climb finally levels off onto an utterly empty, treeless moonscape of volcanic desolation. Welcome to God’s frying pan, this one with a two-lane blacktop running across its center. In the ’60s, Raquel Welch madeOne Million Years B.C. one island over, because that’s what the place looks like.

Towering into view up ahead on this plateau is the cone-perfect peak of the El Tiede volcano, 12,000 feet from the Atlantic waters below. It looks like a Salvador Dalí playground without the melting clocks, and we expected at any moment some prehistoric killing bird to come screeching and flapping out of the sky, snapping and biting and hissing, providing a real moment for that busload of tourists that just pulled off the road behind us, all of them now padding around in their Nikes on the crunchy volcanic ash.

About a half-mile up the road, a brand-new, chalk-white Gallardo LP560-4 Spyder makes a U-turn. Its driver can see there is no place for cops to hide in this sorrowful emptiness. In a moment we hear the first explosive sounds of the guy laying into it. Suddenly the car’s howl seems to split the sky open. The tourists turn fearfully, and begin to move to the road’s edge. The paddle shifts comeone-two-three and there’s that piercing cry of an F1 car that a moment later turns into an eye-bulging Pavarotti high note—and yes, itdoes look like some killer pterodactyl coming at you, hugging the ground, hawk-eyed, closing quickly, just wailing. And when it blows by flat out, it whips a whoosh of wind across the faces of a busload of open-mouthed but definitely thrilled Spanish tourists.

That would sell about anybody, this mid-mounted, 5.2-liter V-10 engine in full song. All 552 hp just flung out of the box, it honks to 60 mph in about four seconds and to 100 mph in just over seven. Given enough room, it will go a claimed 201 mph.

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