Weekend Drive by Hormazd Sorabjee: Take-off or test drive?
Racing a Lamborghini Revuelto down the Navi Mumbai airport runway brings out the best in the car and the new tarmac
Imagine a place where going slower than 300 kmph could be dangerous. A stretch of tarmac where speed isn’t optional, it’s essential. Imagine a 3.7 km-long runway, where jets will land at speeds between 250 to 290 kmph. Going slower could mean stalling in mid-air...
This is the Navi Mumbai International Airport, a mega infrastructure project nearing completion. What better way to christen it than with something equally monumental: The Lamborghini Revuelto?
Why the Revuelto? It’s the fastest car on sale in India and, like the Navi Mumbai airport, it heralds a future shaped by cutting-edge technology, sustainable power, and groundbreaking engineering. Lambo’s flagship hypercar is an all-wheel-drive, 1015 hp, plug-in hybrid V12 missile. It’s the most powerful Lamborghini ever made. And on a runway, this raging bull can fly.
The 6.5-litre V12 is augmented by three electric motors (two up front for torque vectoring, one in the gearbox) that catapult the car from 0 to 100 kmph in just 2.5 seconds, and 200 kmph in 7 seconds flat. But today, we’re aiming higher. Much higher.
“Autocar 25, you’re cleared for takeoff.”
The words crackle over the walkie-talkie as I sit strapped into the Revuelto’s carbon-fibre cockpit, staring down the smoothest asphalt in India. I floor the throttle pedal and we’re off — like we’ve been launched from a catapult. This isn’t a drive. This is a lift-off.
The numbers flash by: 240, 270, 300. The car stays arrow-straight, the active rear wing adjusting its angle for maximum downforce. We’re at 355 kmph before the soft limiter intervenes, as if to say, “Okay, that’s enough for today.” But on this runway, where there’s no traffic, nowhere to go but straight ahead, it doesn’t feel fast. It feels right.
And that’s fitting, because the runway is Code F compliant, built to handle Boeing 777s and the mammoth Airbus A380, with max take-off weights reaching 560 tonnes. That’s over 400 times heavier than the Revuelto, which today feels like a dart on an Olympic javelin pitch.
What strikes you most with this car isn’t just the speed. It’s the serenity of the drive. The runway is so perfectly surfaced, so wide, so devoid of distraction, that the Revuelto feels eerily at home. It glides. It howls. It carves air like a jet slicing through the sky, even as the adaptive rear wing keeps it grounded. The carbon ceramic brakes — each disc is bigger than a dinner plate — haul it down from ludicrous speed with the poise of an aircraft with reverse thrusts on full. In those few moments, you forget you’re on Earth.
Soon, this strip will be home to jet planes. And when I take my first flight from here, I’ll smile — because I first flew from here, not in the air, but on the ground. In a Revuelto.
From HT Brunch, April 26, 2025
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