2024 Lamborghini Urus Performante

One could argue that making an SUV more capable around a race track that few owners will likely ever drive is a pointless effort. But when you’re Lamborghini and continually making your products better and faster, it’s in your DNA. It’s just what you do. So, belt yourself in and enjoy vicariously through us.

Driving SUVs at insane speeds around a very fast race track may not sound like a good idea, but we’re here to tell you this Lamborghini Urus Performante is absolutely built for the job. It was hella fast around the nine turns of Roebling Road Raceway and didn’t feel like an SUV at all.

Plus, it was surprisingly easy to quickly get comfortable with pushing an SUV this hard into corners with confidence, all while riding high and eating straightaways up in a hurry.

We had the original Urus here at Roebling five years ago, and for the sequel, this Performante gets an extensive aero makeover including new face, with larger air intakes that add additional cooling, plus an air curtain that channels air over the front wheels. There’s also a reshaped carbon fiber hood with less drag, and additional downforce is created with a new front splitter, roofline wing, and revised hatch spoiler.

Lamborghini has also taken out some weight while upping handling chops by removing the standard Urus’ air spring suspension and bolting on high-performance coil springs, lowering ride height by almost an inch. Yes, this is the same chassis that underpins Porsche’s Cayenne, but it’s worth noting that Urus wheelbase is about 4-inches longer. The extended carbon fiber wheel arches indicate the presence of a wider footprint, and our Performante arrived sporting a set of optional 23-inch wheels and tires; but Lamborghini also sent some 22s with specially made Pirelli P Zero Trofeo Rs for us to sample which were truly spectacular. Though regardless of applied rubber, grip through the corners was never really lacking…

…nor was power, as under the hood is a 4.0-liter V8 with a pair of turbochargers, turning air and fuel into 657 horsepower and 627 lb-ft. of torque, channeled to all four wheels through an eight-speed automatic transmission and active torque vectoring. Exhaust flows through titanium tubes, and at wide open throttle, the music that those pipes produce is our kind of heavy metal, or technically lightweight alloy.

At full throttle, it took us just 3.1 seconds to hit 60 mph; that’s half a second quicker than we saw in the original Urus. There is launch control to ensure that power is perfectly applied depending on available traction; unfortunately, it’s not labeled “Thrust Mode” as in the Huracan. Still, power pours on in steady doses, with our best quarter-mile time on Roebling’s front straight coming in at 11.4 seconds and 121 miles per hour.

Gear shifts snap with precision automatically, but you can trigger them yourself; and working those paddles out on the track, they don’t feel as substantial as those in Lambo cars, but are very responsive and deliver shifts smoothly without upsetting things even when you trigger an upshift mid-corner. The Performante’s brakes were possibly the most impressive part of the whole track experience. We worked them hard non-stop for three days and experienced no fade or any concerns; remarkable for having to deal with close to 5,000-lbs, though those ultra-grippy tires seemed to find every track imperfection in hard braking zones.

And those brakes certainly look up to the task, enormous 17.3-inch carbon-ceramic discs up front with big red 10-piston calipers, 14.6-inch rotors are in the rear. Capability aside, perhaps the thing that stood out the most is that it was just fun to drive this thing around a racetrack, instead of feeling like work as most high-performance SUVs tend to feel like, but with just enough of an edge to keep us on edge…all while being incredibly comfortable inside.

Government Fuel Economy Ratings are 14-City, 19-Highway, and 16-Combined.

And here’s the part where we tell you how crazy expensive it is but that we really want one… $273,880 at a minimum; and yes, we absolutely do want one.

While the Lamborghini Urus Performante is clearly built for the track, it’s an amazing SUV no matter what you drive it on, and that does include non-paved surfaces as well. It may have a lot of German parts underneath it all, but it feels purely Italian, and a true international driving delight.