It looks like a sinister spaceship and with its name translating as 'superlight', the stripped down, 192mph Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera shifts like one, too. Our test pilot finds most Earth roads too puny for this monster

Less is more. That was the most important lesson I learned as I came up through the kitchen ranks.
Take a Dover sole: simply grilled, with butter and lemon, it can be one of the tastiest dishes ever. But subject it to the theatrical ambitions of a spotty-faced chef in a poncy eatery, and that poor sole has now been stuffed with salmon mousseline, rolled, poached and served with deep-fried leeks, aubergine caviar and sauce vierge with clams around the edge.


Waste of time. Great ingredients need no fancy dress, and it's the same with motors.
Fundamentally, a car is a piece of metal with four wheels that goes fast.
The more you add to that, the more you detract.
Take my old gullwing Mercedes.
It was just wonderful to sit inside and look around: no plastic or sub-woofers, just pure technical excellence, with eight simple switches each doing a crucial job.
Even better is the 1948 Maserati racing car I recently bought.
There's a temperature gauge, speed gauge, fuel indicator and that's it.

No seat belts, air bags, heater, roof or doors. It's built for speed and speed alone. Comfort is a pair of goggles and the thin piece of foam under your backside.
Recently, modern supercar manufacturers have rediscovered this important principle.
Porsche has the stripped-down, hyperfast GT3 version of the 911, and Ferrari has used superlight F1 materials to remodel its already speedy 430 into the Scuderia – a car so lean it doesn't have carpets.
Now Lamborghini has done the same thing to its "everyday supercar" the Gallardo, and here's the result: the Superleggera.
I didn't expect much. I won't say I've never been a Lamborghini fan: like everyone else in the Seventies I had a poster of its mould-breaking, angular Countach on my wall, next to the one of the blonde bird playing tennis with one bum-cheek showing.

Playground legend had it that the Countach was so insanely powerful that when you insured it, life insurance came as standard.
But when I finally got the chance to try one of the Italian dream machines about three years ago – a Diablo owned by a guy I knew – it was a crushing disappointment.
It was painfully cramped inside, you couldn't see a thing behind you and bits dropped off it all the time, so I became an ex-Lamborghini fan.
This new one, however, just changed my mind. Blew my mind, in fact.

Sidling up to my front door in sinister, battleship grey with mysterious carbon fins all over the place, it looked like some kind of MI6 surveillance craft.
I climbed inside – no problems squeezing in – and relaxed into one of the best seats I've ever sat in, covered in black Alcantara with purposeful racing harnesses.
The same cloth is used on the roof lining and dashboard, which has a mere six switches and no radio (no point, you wouldn't be able to hear it anyway).
Everything else is matt black carbon, saving 154lb weight against the standard Gallardo – while the V10 engine has been tweaked to increase the horsepower.
The doors were the best touch: just a thin slice of carbon with one switch for the windows, a door handle and nothing else.
It's the skeletal Grim Reaper of the motoring world and I could already feel its power.
When you fire up this car, it's an event.
Do it in town and you set off every car alarm for a hundred yards.
Not that you should take the Superleggera into town: you're forever pressing the button that lifts the nose to go over speed bumps.
It's like a shark out of water.

I went to the shops in Knightsbridge and couldn't wait to get out of the traffic.
But then our photographer had the genius idea of shooting it in the Blackwall Tunnel.
This meant going round and round for a few dozen retakes, until the clutch overheated and the dashboard lit up like an F15 with a missile locked on.
Eventually, the car shut down, blocking one of only two lanes out of London at rush hour. The white van men loved that.
On the motorway, it's a different story.

Grown men actually move out of the way to open up the fast lane and see what you can do. And what you can do is amazing.
With 530bhp pulling at the road via permanent four-wheel drive, when you hit Sports Mode, put your foot down and let the "e-gear" do its split-second upshifting thing, there's nothing else that can catch you.
And, although you're ludicrously close to the ground as the speedo races towards 196mph (the roof's lower than a lorry's tyre at only 1.16m high), you feel safe in the harnesses and sports seats.
Just as well, as this thing blasts round bends as well as any car I've driven, generating serious G-force as mercilessly firm dampers and limited-slip rear differential ensure none of the power bleeds away.
Pulling off the motorway into my sleepy village was like being dropped off from an alien abduction.
I felt completely out of place, and everything I'd loved about the Countach as a kid came flooding back.

Lamborghinis – especially this one and the even more insane new 800-grand Reventon – look like nothing else.
And since Audi bought the company a decade ago, they finally drive as well as they look.
The Superleggera is brilliant in every way.
I love the fact that in this age of eco-panic, someone somewhere is keeping a cool head and producing a car that looks like an evil spaceship, costs £150,000 and does just 13 miles to the gallon. I want one, I want one, I want one.
By JAMES MARTIN
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