When was the last time you saw a Huracan in the wild?

If you live in Central Butte, deep within the great plains of Saskatchewan, your answer will invariably differ from anyone else’s living in one of Canada’s biggest urban centres. As a Torontonian, I’ve become desensitized to Huracans; I see them so often in the span of a week that I rarely do a double-take anymore. Don’t get me started on the Urus.

So, how do you reel a tired Car Person like me back in? Easy. You buy into the “safari” trend by jacking up a Huracan, install the de rigueur off-road dress-up, and call it the Sterrato. It’s not particularly original — is there anything original about a car company specializing in playthings for the rich buying into trends in order to make even more money? — but that doesn’t matter because the 2024 Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato is absolutely sick.

This isn’t the first time the VW empire flirted with the idea of a supercar-based off-roader. A little over a decade ago, Audi teased the Nanuk, a similar idea to the Sterrato but applied to an R8 instead. Given Audi’s penchant for playing in the dirt, it’s a little surprising a production-spec Nanuk didn’t happen, but then again, Lamborghini is known to go nuts for the sake of going nuts. And with safari builds still being all the rage in enthusiast circles, this lifted Lambo is the right car at the right time.

The Sterrato’s mechanical bits are identical to a standard Huracan. That means a normally aspirated 5.2-litre V10 sits behind your head, powering all four wheels via a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission. But the Sterrato is rated at 602 horsepower and 413 pound-feet of torque — that’s a 28-hp loss on account of Lamborghini having to seal off the side intakes so the Sterrato doesn’t inhale dirt and dust when you’re ripping it off-road. But don’t worry! They rectified that problem by adding a roof scoop to help the engine breathe … at the expense of any and all rear visibility. Good luck backing into your driveway on a rainy night.

The rest of the changes continue with a 1.7-inch lift over a standard Huracan, bringing the Sterrato’s ground clearance to a generous-for-a-supercar 6.4 inches. It rides on run-flat Bridgestone all-terrain tires wrapped around 19-inch wheels, because that’s the smallest wheel size that’d clear the Huracan’s massive brakes. Lamborghini also futzed with the Sterrato’s suspension tuning and drive modes; there’s more play programmed into the adaptive magnetic dampers, plus a new Rally drive mode that loosens the electronic nannies for more off-road hijinks. You also get underbody skid plates, the aforementioned off-road dress-up including body cladding and roof rack, a slightly facelifted front and rear fascia to accommodate approach and departure angles of 10.4- and 26.5-degrees, respectively, and rally lights that give the front end a moustache.

What isn’t surprising is that the Huracan’s safari treatment hasn’t taken away from the supercar essentials. Hell, if anything, the Sterrato is easier to live with than the standard car on a daily basis. Folding yourself into the Sterrato requires the same sort of yoga moves, though the extra ride height makes it a smidge less likely you’ll pull a muscle on the way out. Flipping up the little red cover and poking the start button evokes the same kind of giddiness and spine-tingling goosebumps as the V10 snarks awake. The extra suspension travel and slightly cushier sidewalls makes the Sterrato less jarring over potholes, expansion joints, and most other imperfections — though it’s hardly quiet — and you don’t have to worry about curbs or ramps as much as you would normally.

What is surprising about the 2024 Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato is what it does to you. For all its approachability and livability, it’ll still make you sweat. A couple of tugs on the left paddle shifter kicks the transmission down in the blink of an eye; your palms will sweat into the fuzzy Alcantara steering wheel as you drop the hammer and you flirt with its redline over and over and over. The sensation of g-forces supergluing you to the seat; the sound of the free-breathing V10 buttering up your ears from directly behind your head; the way the Sterrato stays absolutely unfazed around a tight on-ramp in the rain simply reduces you to a giggling mess.

And that’s exactly what a tired Car Person like me needs. Ater a while, you get used to seeing Huracans in the wild. You want something different. Something out of the ordinary. Something that rips what you’re used to out of your hands, chucks it onto the ground, and curb-stomps all over it. The 2024 Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato is that. For all the serious, race-car-for-the-road Huracan flavours we’ve seen over the years, the Sterrato is an entirely different beast. It embraces being unusual. It doesn’t take itself seriously. It just wants to have fun. And it invites you to do the same.

Take Two: I’m genuinely afraid of the 2024 Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato

I’ve only been doing this for a couple of years, but in that short time, not much moves me anymore and I’ve been accused of being more than a little jaded. There may be some underlying issues contributing to that. Whatever, we all have our demons. But this bewilderingly stupid lifted Lambo ripped those demons out of me and played with them. I don’t think I’ve ever been so afraid of a car.

I’m not afraid of it because it’s a scary car. The Huracan is relatively docile among supercars, what with its Audi-influenced DNA taming the raging bull within that used to define Lamborghini’s character. This 2024 Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato is, if anything, even more approachable: it’s AWD, it has clever traction control, the controls are fairly communicative and organic, and it’s even automatic for the nouveau riche who want to have a badass car but can’t actually, you know, drive a badass car.

The Bridgestone Dueler all-terrain rolling stock — designed specifically for the Sterrato — is a world apart from the sticky Pirelli P-Zeros that these cars are usually equipped with, dramatically decreasing mechanical grip, and in turn, the car’s limits. You don’t need to go psychotically fast to explore the limits of the Sterrato like you do with most other six-figure supercars. You can feel it gradually break traction, with the body transferring weight and gently rolling over on its lifted suspenders, squirming to contain the ferocious power you’re trying to put down.

In a strictly objective way, it’s so much less edgy and spooky than anything vaguely like it. And if you overcook it and send it into the grass, it’s not automatically the end of the world, which is nice. Despite all this, it scares me. Not because of what it is or isn’t, but because of what it does to me. Its 602 horsepower is nothing compared to its power as a corrupting force. I’m afraid of it the same way a recovering alcoholic is afraid of an unattended bottle of vodka.

Please don’t leave me alone with it.

I’ve been down this road enough times to recognize this, to know what it looks like when the skeletons in the closet decide to hijack your brain in a conquest for dopamine. I usually have enough time to hopefully put up something resembling a defence, but I wasn’t ready for how fast this happened — approximately 30 seconds. I fired it up, started toddling down the road, put it in Sport mode out of curiosity’s sake — it’s my job to evaluate this, after all — gave the skinny pedal a nudge, and I was gone. Physically and figuratively.

I was there the whole time and I don’t know what happened. I clicked the downshift paddle and the Sterrato tickled with instant kickdowns, prodding the bi-polar V10 into a manic state, at which point I began giggling like an idiot. I goosed the throttle — just a little taste, I swear — and was met with such a wild response, a sharp hit of dopamine, oxytocin, and adrenaline that was so immediate and dramatic and violent that I was reduced to a cackling lunatic in the blink of an eye. It was like every anti-drug PSA you’ve ever seen, that caricature of a person instantaneously being turned into a junkie after one hit. From “oh that’s good” to “I’ll tell you when I’ve had enough” in seconds.

I wasn’t myself. I needed more, and I needed it now. Like the alchy with the already cracked bottle of vodka, I took more, and more, and more still, until there was no more to be had. Who was going to stop me? I had a taste of that intoxicating power, the drama, the domineering chorus of rage bellowed by its unencumbered lungs. I demanded everything it had to give me all the way up to its dizzying 8,500 rpm shriek, and bang into the next gear, again and again and again, until there was no road left. This thing doesn’t even need roads.

At least I think that’s what happened. I don’t know who I became. I can tell you he had no impulse control. I can tell you he scared the snot out of me. In a flash, he tore down all the sense of composure of sensibility and mortality that I thought I had. I thought I had dealt with him years ago. I was awash with anxiety, with that old familiar and very unwelcome feeling of waking up after blacking out, terrified of not knowing what I had or hadn’t done, of what I did while I wasn’t myself, and dreading finding out who saw me doing it.

I’m okay. The car’s okay. It can’t be that bad, right? That wasn’t me, I swear. It must have been the other guy in the 2024 Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato. —Nathan Leipsig

Photos by Nathan Leipsig and Theron Lane