By Michael Taylor
Thursday, Oct 8th, 2009 @ 12:36 pm

It has been about 10 years since Lamborghini released a rear-wheel drive car, so the Gallardo LP550-2 Vittorio Balboni is long, long overdue. We should have picked up the hint when the Gallardo upgrade was christened “LP560-4” because you wouldn’t call it “4” when everybody knew it was all-wheel drive, unless you were planning to launch something with something else.
About 41 years ago, an older tractor maker named Ferruccio Lamborghini recruited a young man to join the fledgling sports car company he built purely to spite Enzo Ferrari , whose customer relationship management he didn’t think much of.

Valentino Balboni was quickly recognized as a man with a uniquely sensitive touch, so it didn’t take long for him to become Lamborghini ’s chief test driver. The Miura, the Espada, the Countach and the Diablo all have his fingerprints all over them and he was usually the first man to drive every single car that left the factory.

Though he officially retired last year, his recognition as Lamborghini’s greatest global ambassador, a man who has driven with kings and captains of industry, means he is back.

Aptly named
But that’s not all, because Lamborghini has snuck in a car just for him. It’s like no other current Lambo. In fact, the LP550-2 Valentino Balboni is like no other Lamborghini in the past 10 years.

That’s because they’ve done away with the front differential and made a proper, manly, rear-drive Gallardo, still powered by the same direct-injection 5.2-liter V10 and now dripping with menace and agility.

Losing the front diff might sound easy to do (and, in truth, the Reiter Engineering race team took delivery of more than 50 rear-drive Gallardos for racing duties over the last two years, so it’s not been that hard), but it exposes the Gallardo to a whole new world of rivalries.

The obvious is the one across town, on the other side of Modena. Take your pick from the F430 Berlinetta to the F430 Scuderia. Relations between the two brands are not as fiery as you might imagine, but it’s still keenly felt and Ferrari unofficially regards anybody who buys a Lamborghini as someone who has made a mistake. Lamborghini, on the other hand, regards a Ferrari buyer as someone who takes the safe option.

Scaling back the tech
As a back-to-the-future model, the LP550-2 not only lists no technical breakthroughs, it actually goes backwards.

For starters, Lambo ripped a lot of weight out of the LP560-4’s front diff compared to the original Gallardo, but the Balboni car does away with it, and the centre diff, completely.

Not just that, but it has less power, too. That’s only a minor software tweak, though, because the only mechanical difference through the powertrain (apart from the amputated diffs) is a new exhaust.

Though the LP550-2 Balboni doesn’t take Lamborghini in a new styling direction, it does modify the existing goods a bit. Shy people don’t go near Lamborghini showrooms with checkbooks, but you’ll need an astonishingly high tolerance for attention to fork out for a Balboni edition car, even if there’s only 250 of them worldwide.

For starters, the colours are, well, bright. Bright yellow, bright green, just plain bright. Then, in case anybody missed it, there’s a long white stripe down the middle, then another offset stripe down one side of that.

Visually, it’s a trifle loud, perhaps.

It’s a bit the same inside, with the two sharpest color contrasts they could find in the leather shop slapped together to make a lighter, brighter interior, all the way from the seats to the dashboard.

And then there’s Balboni’s signature, machined into a piece of alloy that you see every time you approach the door handle.

It still has satellite navigation, it still has the Audi -sourced multi-media system and screen and it still feels like a luxurious, comfortable place from which to launch attacks.

Full military power?
Boy, howdie, does it go. It blasts to 62 mph in 3.9 seconds, which is slower than a Scuderia, but repeatable and easy to do.

The differences go much deeper than you’d think, though. The engine sounds different, even at idle. It’s somehow smoother and it feels stronger at low rpm, even if the numbers don’t suggest any reason for it.

Trickling around town, it certainly feels more willing to whip the tacho needle around the dial – not that a Gallardo tacho needle is one of the slower ones out there.

A big part of that is the reduced friction of not having two major mechanical bits for its 550 horsepower to negotiate on its way to the wheels and part of it is having 70kg less weight to move every time you want to go anywhere.

There’s also the complete (and welcome) lack of crunching chunk-chunk-chunk feel through the steering and the front end because there’s no tight front diff to complain about being stretched.

But rear-drive or not, it is still demonstrably a Gallardo in character. You could say that was obvious, because it’s still based on the same all-aluminum space-frame chassis, with the suspension bolted directly into the chassis and the 5.2-liter V10 engine dropped in almost last of all. That means it’s still user friendly, fast, entertaining and a terrific drive.

While Balboni insisted he preferred the manual gearbox (which is the standard unit), with its polished aluminum gearshift and seven gates, our test car was the E.Gear paddle shift semi-automatic unit and it’s easy to use and smoother than it once was.

Even at low speed, though, it’s the steering that stands out, rather than the engine or gearbox. The steering was (is) not one of the standard Gallardo’s high points. The LP550-2 instead has far more feedback and more weight to it and it instantly feels like you’re using something more intimate and masculine.

Even when you drive it normally, it feels slightly different, too, with its tail-down stance, but find some corners and you’ll see why it’s like that.

The first series of quick bends are revealing: the Balboni car instantly makes even Gallardos feel cumbersome and ponderous. They’re not, of course. They’re amongst the sharpest-handling machines around, but the LP550-2 is simply brilliant.

Its diff-less front end does an astonishingly good job of gathering crucial, real-time info on what’s happening at the contact patch and then sending it up the steering column. (The feel is still not up to Porsche 911 standards, but it’s much better.)

It turns in to a corner much harder, initially, than the standard Gallardo and then lets you choose your stance on the way out. There’s no more waiting until you’ve convinced the centre diff to send as much drive rear-ward as possible. Now, all that power has no alternative, and that lets you to a wonderfully neutral, accurate cornering stance.

And, when the road suddenly changes direction, the LP550-2 becomes incandescent, delightfully flicking through the direction changes, biting hard at the front end to start things, easing its weight to the back, then firing out again.

If it picks up even more glee in the corners, it hardly loses in the straights,.

It’s not that it’s faster point-to-point than the all-paw car, because it’s probably, almost certainly, not. But it feels like it is. There’s an unapologetic joy about it and you can’t help but being slapped in the face by how much lighter, more agile and more entertaining it feels.

For all that, though, it’s not a tail-happy drift king unless that’s what you provoke from it. The stability control intervention point might be higher than it is in the standard car, but it’s still there – it just lets go of the reins faster after it has done its job than it does in the stock car.

There’s a Sport mode, of course, which shifts faster and, ironically, smoother than in standard (or in the dead-ordinary Automatic mode) and the Corsa track mode is even more aggressive again. Still, it’s nowhere near a F430 Scuderia in terms of shift times.

The only sensible place to even try to slide the tail is on the exits of second gear bends, but the ESP software in Corsa mode keeps it in check very well and it always feels stable and safe even when it’s sliding.

Leftlane’s bottom line

The really odd thing is that the LP550-2 Balboni is so much fun this way that you start to wonder whether the Gallardo was originally designed with this job in mind or whether they’ve just done a superb conversion.
Either way, if you can cope with the loud look of it, and it doesn’t snow much where you live, then this is the pick of the V10 Lambos.

2010 Lamborghini LP550-2 Valentino Balboni base price, $219,800.

Words by Michael Taylor. Photography courtesy Lamborghini

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