OFF-ROAD SUPERCARS ARE A THING NOW, BUT WHICH IS FASTEST? THE LAMBORGHINI HURACáN STERRATO OR PORSCHE 911 DAKAR?
There’s a strange new trend starting to appear from the world’s top supercar manufacturers, off-road capable supercars. Now that’s a thought that every guy has had at some point, and with some cool special editions and private builds it does make sense. To a degree. Lamborghini recently revealed the new Huracán Sterrato, which is basically a Huracán that’s been modded and tweaked in all the right places so that it's at home off the beaten path. It’s an interesting-looking thing, we’re used to seeing this body shape hugging the floor, so raised up on all-terrain tyres with extra body cladding is just cool. To make it even cooler, the thing still makes use of Lamborghini’s legendary 5.2-litre V10 and that means it has a power output of 449 kW with a torque rating of 560 Nm. All good and well then, except for the fact that Lamborghini already makes a car perfectly suited to the task, the Urus. In Performante-spec, the Italian SUV features a twin-turbocharged 4.0-litre V8 with 490 kW of power and 850 Nm of torque. Truly does boggle the mind, but a company like Lamborghini wouldn’t create a beast like the Sterrato if there wasn’t a defined market for it. Unless they were relying on dumb luck and hoping the likes of the world’s automotive YouTubers would snap them up just to have the latest new gadget. It took the Italian automaker a while to bring out the Urus, and it’s been very successful so far. On the German front, Porsche identified the worldwide trend of people opting for SUVs over sedans way back in 2002 when the Cayenne SUV was released, so this world-renowned automaker also has something that can comfortably cruise down gravel roads.
But that clearly wasn't enough, and so the men in white coats decided that they too needed to tweak and change one of their most popular sportscars so that it could offer up stupidly fast fun away from the smooth tarmac. Enter the 911 Dakar, which as the name suggests is based on a 911, and can enter the Dakar. Again, in this case, a perfectly good and stupidly fast weapon of a car was lifted, given off-road tyres, a healthy dose of fitting upgrades and accessories. Powering the cars is Porsche’s trusted twin-turbocharged 3.0-litre 6-cylinder powerplant tuned to produce 353 kW and 570 Nm of torque, which can propel the Dakar to 100 km/h in as little as 3.4 seconds on gravel and a 240 km/h top speed. Weird, but okay. So now that there are two of these from rival automakers, you know what that means? DRAG RACE! We have the normally aspirated 449 kW Sterrato versus the 353 kW Dakar, which seem like miles apart on paper, but we all know that paper stats and real-world conditions don’t mean the same thing. Enter Mat Watson and the Carwow crew who have a knack for answering all these inane motoring questions for us. Some weeks back they managed to wrangle up one of each of these new-fangled dirt-capable supercars on their usual drag strip to see which of the two is worth spending too much money on. The only SXdrv crit for this video is that they should have added in a drag race on the ground net to the runway.
Take a look at the YouTube video that does a great job of showing just how much fun pointless cars can be in this matchup with Lamborghini's off-road creation, the Sterrato, and Porsche's 911 Dakar in a straight-up drag race. You can always count on Mat Watson to get hold of the good stuff to answer weird motoring questions for us: Off-road Lambo v Off-road Porsche: DRAG RACE | Carwow
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News Off-Road Dakar Sterrato Porsche 911 Dakar Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato SXdrv Mat Watson Carwow Drag Race