Features

The clutch has the sort of light, progressive action an old Lambo could only have dreamt of. The gear lever, topped with an aluminium ball in the time-honoured fashion, moves with unerring accuracy between the exposed gates.

And the throttle pedal marries exactly the right amount of travel with the right sort of resistance - smoothly upholstered but technically rigorous at the same time. Highly efficiently engineered, just like you'd imagine a track-oriented Lamborghini with Audi DNA would be.

Throttle off abruptly in traffic, though, and there's the first reminder this thing is packing 522bhp. There's no slop in the drive-train, not even a millimetre, so it pays to be smooth with your inputs.

Provided you manage this, the Superleggera is tractable and friendly, even at LA posing pace. Shuffle down to little more than a crawl in third gear, and it picks up again without having to clear its throat. Quite an achievement.

We're on our way to a mountain road well-known to south California's adrenalin junkies, but the dense traffic is good character-building stuff: if a car as potentially highly strung as this can survive here, it can survive anywhere.

The Superleggera weighs 1,330kg, 100 less than the existing car, and sound-deadening material has been stripped out in the hunt for lighter weight. The side and rear windows are made of Makrolon, a featherweight plastic, rather than glass (almost half of the weight reduction is in the interior). It should be noisy as hell in here, but it's perfectly tolerable.

The cabin is trimmed in tactile Alcantara instead of leather, and there's carbon fibre on the doors, dashboard and transmission tunnel. Even the interior-door grab handles have been replaced with slimline Alcantara straps, with little carbon-fibre inserts to offset wear and tear.

There's no radio, and a CD/satnav combo is an option. If you get bored in a traffic jam, you could always inspect the stitching in the roof head-lining that matches the exterior colour.