Thank Frankel it's Friday: Driving Lamborghini's SUV

It will seat five, it will be turbocharged and if you tried to drive it across a ploughed field, instead of wrecking itself on the first rut, it will almost certainly feel as at home in this environment as on the public road. It’s called the Urus, it’s an SUV, the first Lamborghini to use forced induction engines, the first to be offered as a hybrid and, as such a Lamborghini like no other in history. 

Or is it? Unlike Bentley, Maserati, Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin and, soon we hear, Ferrari, Lamborghini is not quite the SUV newbie most will presume. Back in the 1980s Sant Agata designed, built and sold another and, just once, I got to drive it.

The car was in the temporary custody of Goodwood veteran and Ferrari salesman, the late Mike Salmon, an old family friend who used to delight in turning up in whatever his latest trade-in might be and tossing me the key. On this particular occasion and implausible as it still sounds from a distance of nearly 30 years, that car was a Lamborghini LM002.

I had not at that fledgeling stage in my career as a motoring hack so much as sat in any Lamborghini, let alone driven one. And this one was so intimidating it made a Countach look about as threatening as Vauxhall Corsa. Or Nova as I recall they were then known. The unwanted progeny of a failed attempt to produce Italy’s answer to the Humvee, the LM002 looked like a dual cab pick up from some dystopian world which would have reduced Mad Max himself to a gibbering wreck. And I was no Mel Gibson. Standing there, listening to its six downdraft Weber carburettors manfully pouring rivers of four-star into the depths of its snarling, spitting 5.2-litre V12 engine, looking at its towering flanks, preposterous width and a face only its mother could love, part of me wanted just to say I wasn’t quite ready for this and go and have a little lie down. But rather more of me realised there’d never be another chance like it.

So I climbed, yes climbed, up into its cabin and marvelled at once at many different aspects of its inexpertly assembled design. It was so wide your front seat passenger was in another postcode yet, despite the huge, hulking bulk of the thing, those in the back had almost no legroom at all. There were switches everywhere, which I quite liked especially as I wasn’t going to be here long enough to need to know what any of them did, rudimentary dials and, amid all this industrial clutter, a steering wheel from a Countach.

I set off, slowly at first, finding my way around its surprisingly co-operative gearbox, wondering if then clutch really needed to be so stupidly heavy and trying to keep as far over to the left as possible to avoid inadvertently swiping something coming the other way with the far side of the car; as all LM002s are left-hand-drive, this felt like driving in the hedge.

But the time soon came when I’d found a little space and gathered enough courage to see what it could really so. And the answer was not much. Not even the best endeavours of the howling, shrieking engine could disguise the fact that the LM002 just wasn’t that fast. In a drag race between it and a modern little warmed up hatch like a Fiesta ST, my money would be on the Ford every day of the week, month or year. Even in 1988 or whenever it was, I doubt very much it would have seen which way a Peugeot 205 GTI went. And that’s before you got to a corner. To be honest I was far too scared to start sliding someone else’s enormous 2.7 tonne Lamborghini around, but it would be fair to say that, despite the biggest tyres I’d ever seen on a road car, there was nothing about the way the LM002 handled that made me want to lean on it to any extent at all.

All it could claim was character and it oozed out of every vent, slat and panel gap. The fact I remember it so well so many years later tells you all you need to know even though, by any objective assessment, it was a pretty terrible car.

The Urus is unlikely to be terrible. Based on the same platform as the Bentley Bentayga and new Porsche Cayenne it is, in fact, highly likely to be beautifully built, have fine handling, be practical in a way no previous Lamborghini could imagine and, with a 4-litre twin turbo V8 producing around 600bhp under its bonnet, be very fast indeed. But there remains a challenge here and it is the absolute opposite that faced by its forebear. The LM002 was a Lamborghini that tried (and failed) to be a convincing SUV. Knowing what lies beneath it, I can near enough guarantee the Urus will be a convincing SUV, but can it also be a credible Lamborghini? We’ll find out more on December 4^th.