The roaring boys: Lamborghini Huracan Evo fleet sweeps Abu Dhabi

A convoy of 10 Italian supercars made an understated trip through the capital city's streets, before really letting rip at Yas Marina Circuit

The Lamborghini Huracan Evos, ready to tear it up on the Yas circuit. All photos courtesy Lamborghini

The supercar is powered by a 5.2-litre V10 engine

The vehicles drew admiring glances from crowds

The Huracan can do 0-100kph in 2.9 seconds

The convoy heads out into Abu Dhabi

The Huracan's central console

A special-edition Huracan

The nose of the Huracan is close to the ground

Those numbers will go up very fast when you put your foot down

In sight of Yas Marina Circuit

The drivers receive a briefing before moving out

Inside the Evo

That red gets everywhere

The road bridge over Yas circuit

When you line 10 cars up outside a hotel and passers-by stop, stare and shoot enough images and video footage to break Instagram’s server network, you know the vehicles in question might not be the kind you take if you wanted to make an under-the-radar journey.

That attention, though, is the sort of reaction even a single Lamborghini Huracan Evo can generate, let alone a whole bunch of them. When the crowds gathered outside the W Hotel at Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi, you realise what your average K-pop act has to endure every time they visit … well, anywhere.

Lamborghini’s publicity crew in the UAE had organised this event to showcase the Huracan’s abilities as both a road and track car. This, then, was a two-handed affair – first, take a trip through the streets of Abu Dhabi in one of the 10 shiny growlers, then turn up at the capital’s Formula 1 circuit to see how much hair you could lose over a series of full-throttle laps.

The initial jaunt through the city showed that you can indeed just about use a car of this kind in an urban environment, but it’s not without issues. The nose of the Huracan is close to the ground and, even though you can nudge it up a few millimetres via a convenient control inside the cabin, you have to move over speed bumps at glacial speed. No one wanted to be the first to damage a car worth in the region of Dh1 million (give or take a couple of hundred thousand either way, depending on what extras you choose).

It’s also a pretty low-slung affair, the Huracan, so vision can be an issue. Sitting under traffic lights requires you to stick your head against the windscreen and stare up at an alarming angle if you’re to see when the signals change. Leaving face prints on that finely crafted glass is not unusual, which somewhat takes away from the image one might hope to portray to other drivers.

These things aside, though, the Huracan performs well at low speed, behaving in traffic and not, unlike some of its contemporaries, threatening to launch you into the nearest wall if you make an accelerator faux-pas.

The cars drew plenty of admiring glances while in the capital. Courtesy Lamborghini

It’s all a bit different when you get one of these brightly hued beasts on the track. Here, everything makes complete sense. The Huracan is a hoodlum when it comes to speed and acceleration – you’d expect that from any two-seater powered by a 5.2-litre V10 engine – but it also manages to make even the shoddiest driver look half decent in any event where hitting the red line is desirable.

The Huracan has something called an LDVI, which apparently stands for Lamborghini Dinamica Veicolo Integrata. Dismissing all the technical guff, what this does is recognise an individual driver’s skills (or lack thereof) and react accordingly. No, we don’t know how it works either, but it does.

You can really get this car moving and not look like a horse’s behind after either wrecking it or, at the very least, allowing it to spin like an out-of-control gyroscope. Drivers will still need to give the Huracan their utmost attention, of course – it’s not an autonomous car – but anyone behind the wheel will look rather better than they have any right to.

Tearing down the main straight at the Yas Marina Circuit, and doing so in an environment where you can fully exploit the Huracan’s ability to do 0-100kph in 2.9 seconds, is beyond exhilarating. You can also power slide it, due to a specific setting Lamborghini has introduced, which is surprising.

These days, Lamborghini’s biggest seller is its Urus 4x4, a model that has significantly upped the total number of units the manufacturer shifts each year. While not selling anywhere near the same number, the Huracan Evo is still a remarkable vehicle. It’s a properly innovative product and will make anyone driving it look good, skilled or otherwise. Even if you do suffer a serious downgrading in the cool stakes when you stick your face against the windscreen to check the traffic lights. Let’s face it though, you can’t have everything.