2027 Lamborghini Revuelto SV First Drive: It’s a Friendly Monster

It’s not that the 2027 Lamborghini Revuelto SV is too fast; it’s that my brain is too skeptical. I’ve just followed one of the manufacturer’s pro development drivers flat-out at more than 150 mph through the lefthand kink that is Turn 1 of Italy’s Vallelunga Circuit. Standing earlier on the pit wall and staring down toward the entry to this corner and seeing its geometry, it looked like a slight braking input or at least a lift of the throttle might be required there, but it’s barely even a corner from inside the hybrid V-12-powered Revuelto. Flat is easy. But then the Curva Grande Turn 2 righthand sweeper looms quickly, definitely demanding some braking and, if you’ve managed to reach sixth gear on the approach, a corresponding downshift into fifth as you point the car’s nose to keep tight to the apex curbing.

I brake too hard on the first flying lap, and the Lamborghini’s rear end squirms slightly. Nope, that’s certainly not the ticket. Another lap, another attempt—better, but I’m still overslowing the car. I’ve never driven this track, and I’m unsure how fast this bend can be taken while leaving some safety margin.

Yet another lap and, coming off of Turn 1, a call comes from the lead Revuelto SV over the car-to-car radio, its driver keeping one eye on my SV’s attitude through his mirrors: “Brake less, turn in now, get to the inside—you must believe.” OK, then.

This time, the supercar (or maybe you consider it a hypercar) squats smoothly a bit on its suspension; I release my medium-level brake pressure, turn into the corner, and stop worrying about whether the front end will hold the line or push itself into understeer, oblivion, and a potential high-speed off at the exit. The chassis just sticks and, at about 120 mph at the apex, precisely nothing happens as the curbing flies past. I’m still overslowing the car compared to what it can certainly do at the absolute balls-out limit, but the Revuelto SV has made its point.

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Super Veloce

Lamborghini has a long history of using the “SV” suffix—“super veloce,” or “super fast” in English—to denote the highest-performing versions of its flagships. From the Miura SV in 1971 to the Diablo in ’95, the Murciélago in ’09, the Aventador in ’15, and now the 2027 Revuelto (company naming conventions of the time meant the culture-shocking Countach, of all cars, never carried SV badging), those two letters tell the world you’re driving the toppest of top-dog Lambos.

For the new Revuelto SV, limited to 1,963 examples in a nod to the year the late Ferruccio Lamborghini founded his car company, this means it gains some things and loses some things compared to the standard Revuelto. Gone is the active, three-position rear wing, replaced by a fixed carbon-fiber version. Also gone is the regular model’s battery pack with 108 rectangular-shaped cells, replaced by a completely new one with 168 cylindrical cells. The upshot is far greater capacity, 7.3 kWh versus 3.8 kWh, which means better performance and for longer. The plug-in hybrid Revuelto SV’s three electric motors provide up to 255 horsepower, bringing the total output from the powertrain, including its 6.5-liter V-12 (814 hp, 535 lb-ft of torque), to 1,050 hp and 1,051 lb-ft. That’s a 49-hp max gain, and about 18 lb-ft of additional peak torque.

Rear wing aside, other visible changes include some of the bodywork below that wing, a new front splitter and the bladelike bodywork above it, newly designed and standard titanium-alloy, motorsports-derived center-lock wheels (rather than the non-SV's five-lug design), and carbon-fiber interior door panels.

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The Payoff

Back out on the 2.5-mile Vallelunga road course, the Revuelto SV makes a notable step beyond previous big-boy V-12 Lamborghinis, delivering incredibly predictable handling that clearly communicates what its tires are doing, especially when going back to the throttle for corner exits. This was my first experience driving a car fit with Bridgestone’s new semi-slick Potenza Race R rubber, and not only are they flypaper grippy (and measuring a massive and wicked-looking 345/30 R21 in back and 265/35 R20 in front), but in combination with the Revuelto SV, you can almost feel the rears begin to give up before they’ve actually done so—and long, long before you find yourself with your arms crossed up trying to recover a big, dramatic power-oversteer moment.

Surely there’s understeer baked into the chassis, but you need to push the car hugely fast and aggressively before it rears its head—it was never a factor during this first-drive outing. And along with the all-wheel drive and torque-vectoring effect from the front motors, the overall balance is playful and benign, the car’s tech effectively letting you power out of slow corners sooner than you expect, the front end clawing grip out of the track to provide a fair amount of help in that circumstance. The steering accuracy is X-Acto-sharp, and the amount of effort needed to turn the wheel is about perfect, though it lacks the spring-loaded, old-school sim-racing feel some relatively recent Lambos have had. I count the latter as a positive.

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The SV is still a fairly large, heavy car, and there’s plenty of room inside beside that for your head. At 6-foot-1, I can just wedge my helmeted noggin into the car without it being fully smashed against the headliner, but it touches it. Taller drivers who expect to do track sessions will want to consider the optional, more compact one-piece carbon racing seat (a, gulp, $9,467 option), as it gives you a slightly lower seating position but at the cost of not being adjustable other than sliding fore and aft.

Lamborghini says the car weighs about 11 pounds less than the regular Revuelto, with a cited dry weight of 3,907 pounds, meaning its true curb weight exceeds 4,000. Even with its carbon-fiber monocoque chassis, it won’t be much lighter than the 4,128 pounds we measured the hybrid Corvette ZR1X at. Regardless, it feels much nimbler than that suggests on paper. There are a few reasons behind this.

The bodywork’s aerodynamic revisions, Lamborghini says, mean the car makes 80 percent more downforce than the non-SV, though it declined to cite a specific figure in pounds because seemingly every carmaker measures and communicates downforce differently. In other words, unlike, say, horsepower, there’s no industry standard for it, an ongoing irritation for both car companies and publications like MotorTrend. The front end allegedly produces three times as much downforce as the base model, thanks not only to the new splitter but also four vortex generators under the car. That’s a big part of why the front-end response feels so stuck-in and stable at high speeds through a corner like Turn 2 on this track. And if you’re more into bragging about top speed, the efficiency of the aero changes means that despite so much extra downforce, the SV’s aerodynamic drag-reduced top speed of 214 mph is only 3 mph slower than the standard edition’s.

Also helping you feel like a hero at the wheel is the Bosch-supplied 6D (six-dimension) sensor, the brain that brings together and controls the ABS, torque vectoring, traction control, and stability control. The same goes for what Lamborghini calls its Integrated Power Brake, which isn’t a brake itself but rather an intelligent hydraulic controller that manages brake pressure at all four corners.

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According to the engineers on hand at Vallelunga, the IPB combined with the 6D unit delivers much better prediction of the car’s dynamic behavior, like how much tire grip is available under both power and braking.

In practice, it all works exceptionally well, and not just when it comes to controlling the chassis’ rotation and carrying speed from apexes to exits. The SV’s new brake setup, developed with Brembo, is one of the best I’ve ever experienced, and that’s saying something in 2026. Sure, the 16.5-inch front and 16.1-inch rear carbon-ceramic rotors are gargantuan, but their exceptional feel and stopping power isn’t just down to size.

For starters, the setup Lamborghini calls CCM-R Plus (short for carbon-ceramic matrix–race) uses the long-strand carbon formulation found in top-level racing and that’s been trickling down into supercars, as well as a silicon-carbide surface layer (the Plus in the name). It all equals better thermal conductivity and heat distribution, meaning the brakes stay cooler and are more resistant to the rotors developing hot spots.

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That all sounds great on paper, but you really feel it in practice when braking hard on the track. The pedal feel is rock-solid, and it’s a cinch to modulate braking inputs. Another notable and noticeable benefit is that with the 6D and IPB units calculating everything on the fly and predicting the amount of available grip, you get far less ABS oscillation (or feedback, if you prefer) and less variance of ABS pulses/chatter through the pedal. Think of it this way: The system essentially works like a digital threshold braker, a pro-driver-level assistant that lets you get the most out of the car under braking without allowing you to cross over into the dreaded “wooden” pedal zone that kills braking performance, stopping distances, and lap times. It’s an epic addition here, and one that will hopefully make its way into models other than the SV eventually.

However, an important note about the powertrain when it comes to plug-in hybrid supercars like this: The peak horsepower and torque figures are mightily stout, as is the raw, maw-gaping acceleration they give you, but you don’t have limitless access to them. It’s not an issue when driving on the street (this Lamborghini-organized launch event was track-only) because you’re far from always being on the power, but on an average circuit roughly the length of Vallelunga, three laps at full song are about all you can expect before the battery begins to run out of juice, or “derate”—a term Formula 1 fans are well familiar with under the present generation of hybrid race cars.

At that point, you need to turn a rotary switch on the steering wheel from battery Performance mode to Recharge and cruise around for a lap or so to replenish the Revuelto’s cells, the most efficient way of doing so being to use the left pedal as little as possible to avoid wasting recoverable energy through the mechanical brakes and holding a consistent rpm level as best you can. On one hand, maybe it’s not that big a deal if you aren’t actually racing for official positions. On the other, knowing that track day drivers (including us) tend to value every lap they can get in every session makes it easy to envision them becoming mightily frustrated by this. Picture a scenario where you’re driving a 10- or 15-lap session and need to coast around on every fourth lap while staying out of other people’s way and losing whatever rhythm you had been in. There’s no way around the fact it’s simply not ideal for a certain type of driver and use case.

As for the suspension, the rear damper setup gets a new mounting point that attaches it to the upright rather than the lower control arm; Lamborghini says this puts the dampers more in-phase with wheel travel for better stability and cornering roll-phase control. And the suspension overall follows the SV’s motorsports influence by ditching the standard Revuelto’s active dampers in favor of passive ones that feature manual adjustment (via four dials per damper in two separate stacks, with two dials per stack) of high- and low-speed compression and rebound behavior. There are 14 positions available for each, numbered 0–13; 0 gives you the highest, stiffest damping force and 13 the most comfortable. The latter, the engineers say, is akin to the adaptive system’s most comfort-oriented setting. Drivers don’t need to be race engineers to take advantage of the range of adjustment, as Lamborghini provides a written guide for best tuning the setup for various conditions you’re likely to encounter, including four clear settings for Wet, Track, Bumpy Road, and Flat (smooth) Road.

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Along with what Lamborghni claims are 30 percent quicker shifts from the eight-speed dual-clutch gearbox (difficult to comment on without driving the standard car back to back here, but we’ve no complaints about the transmission’s performance and behavior on the track), the last fun trick up the Revuelto SV’s racing suit sleeve is the new Pilota driving mode, also possible due to the new electronic brainpower onboard. First turn the red dial on the left of the steering wheel to Corsa mode, then hold down the similar-looking one on the right for 2.5 seconds. Press it once more to confirm activation, and you now have access to a five-level variable traction control system, the company’s first such offering. It also apparently makes some electronic adjustments to the ABS and stability control that correspond to the setting you choose, but those items aren’t selectable separately or directly tunable by the driver. You absolutely feel the differences between the levels, with 1 being the most restrictive and 5 being the least and allowing the car to rotate and slide gleefully while still providing a bit of a safety net.

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All Told

The 2027 Lamborghini Revuelto SV takes what was already a hell of a good time and makes real gains on it—differences a driver can legit feel, revel in, and take advantage of, and which aren’t intimidating to access or just items to brag about when comparing spec charts with their other monied friends. It’s easily the best-driving, highest-performing SV ever and doesn’t rely on its big horsepower to define it—but it had to be all that to even begin to justify its starting price of $749,667 (including gas-guzzler tax). Standing in Vallelunga’s pit lane, we can hear the guffaws and comparisons to the half-million-bucks cheaper ZR1X coming all the way across the Atlantic from Detroit. But if you’re one of those people who doesn’t get or care about the whole Lambo thing, you probably didn’t care to read this far, anyway.