When I was a kid and had just started to develop an interest in cars, there was one car that was on the mouth of every kid back then, “Lamborghini Gallardo”. It was the poster and the wallpaper car for nearly a decade. Everyone was crazy about it. It ultimately became the dream car for every child and why wouldn’t it be? It had looks to die for, a wonderful engine to power it and it sounded like nothing else in the car world. A Naturally Aspirated 5.0 liter V10 engine with an 8,000rpm redline, how cool is that. The Gallardo received a lot of criticism because Lamborghini had gone under the ownership of Audi. People started questioning the Gallardo, that whether it was a True Lamborghini Product or not. But later did they realized after driving the Gallardo, that Lamborghini hadn’t lost their Italian driving essence and their ownership by Audi was a great decision. The Gallardo was produced for over a decade. There were many iterations of the Gallardo over the years. The Lp 550-2 was the one that every car enthusiast loved, it came with two transmission options. You could wither get a 6 speed open gated Manual Transmission or a 6-speed automatic which was called the “E-gear”. Both of the transmissions were great but it was the open gated Manual transmission that everyone wanted. Today, you could buy an Lp 550-2 Gallardo with E gear, there are plenty of them on sale. Good luck to you if you are going to find an Lp 550-2 manual for sale. The Lp 550-2 was rear-wheel drive, which made it a lot of fun, to drive one. It was so good, that people true car enthusiasts like Jay leno, Chris harris and Jethro Bovingdon preferred it over the more powerful AWD Superleggera. Also, the minimalist design of the Lp 550-2 was preferred over the winged Superleggera. This Car was so much special than people thought it was. It was one of the Last Old School Supercars. It was a true Driver’s car in every possible way. The aim behind making this car was to make Lamborghini’s accessible to a larger audience. It was an entry Level Lamborghini, but there was nothing entry Level from the performance point of view. It had 542 Hp. 540 Nm of torque. 0 to 60 Mph took 3.6 sec and top speed was 199mph. The competition it faced at its time was McLaren 12c and the Ferrari 458, both of them were superior to the Gallardo in terms of performance but they were a lot expensive too. Also, the Sound of the roaring V10 was unmatched. It weighed 3410 pounds, which was not quite light but it was on par with the competition. The Chassis balance of this car is brilliant. The AWD Superleggera tends to understeer a Lot. But the Lp 550-2 keeps the ride well balanced. If you get a bit hard on the throttle, you can get any amount of oversteer you want, which is ideal for drifting in corners. The car came with steel brakes unlike the modern Lamborghini’s which come with carbon-ceramic brakes as standard. And the brakes were good. The rear of the car was accentuated by the addition of quad exhausts as opposed to the dual exhaust that the first-gen Gallardo came with. The car didn’t come with a push-button start of anything fancy like that, you had to insert the key in the keyhole and then push to forward to start the car. These old school bits made the car so much appealing to drivers. The ride quality was very harsh and there was no way to adjust it unlike the Ferrari 458 which came with features to control the ride quality. But it’s all part of the experience. The steering wheel on the car had no buttons, No gimmicks, there was nothing to distract the driver, and it was just plain and simple. You had your riding modes buttons just in front of the gearbox. There are few cars that you could push to the apex and extract the full out of them. Today the supercar industry is more of a Horsepower battle between manufacturers. 700-800 hp is a standard horsepower number these days. Lamborghini’s, in general, have always been aggressive-looking supercars, be it the Aventador, the Huracan or even the Murcielago. But the Gallardo is one of the very few Lamborghini’s that could be termed beautiful. Hoping you all liked it. Till then, Chao
