NEW YORK CITY is probably not on top of anyone?s list of best places to drive a 190-m.p.h. Italian supercar. But trust me: the combination of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and the Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera is an underground under-the-radar thrill. The tunnel, which connects Brooklyn and Manhattan below New York Harbor, proved the perfect concert hall for the Gallardo?s 10 soaring cylinders. As I fired its bellicose engine to 8,000 r.p.m., the Gallardo convinced me ? and other drivers, judging by the startled expressions ? that we had entered a Michael Bay movie in which a runaway F-16 was strafing its way down the tunnel. If it?s hard for you to put a price tag on that kind of entertainment, allow Lamborghini to do so: That will be $224,800 to start for this lighter, faster, more expensive version of the regular $199,900 Gallardo. (The V-8 powered Audi R8, which shares the Lambo?s aluminum space frame, all-wheel-drive system and midengine layout, is a relative bargain, starting at $118,000).Driving any Lamborghini, whose interstellar styling never fades into the background, is a handy Rorschach test: Onlookers either melt into beatific puddles at first sight, or they studiously ignore the car while dismissing its driver as a cologne-dipped jackass. (When it?s you in the driver?s seat, those in the second group are clearly just jealous.)Compared with the standard Gallardo, the Superleggera ? or super light ? follows the carbon-fiber diet to shed 154 pounds. The weight-saving material is used for the seats, inner door panels, exterior mirrors, underbody cover, rear spoiler, engine hatch cover and more. Lamborghini claims a weight of 2,998 pounds, though Car and Driver found it topped 3,400, heavier than a Corvette or Porsche 911.Still, the V-10 had no trouble hurtling the Gallardo to 60 miles an hour in 3.5 seconds and to 100 m.p.h. in 7.9 seconds in Car and Driver?s testing. It clocked the quarter-mile in 11.7 seconds, by which time it was traveling 123 m.p.h., and sparking fits of giggles. Inside the lovely hand-built cabin, seemingly every surface is swaddled in Alcantara suede, including the form-fitting seats. The navigation and climate controls are familiar Audi gear, which means they work better than those on any Italian car in memory.It?s a bit tricky to climb in or out, via conventional portals rather than the scissor-action doors of the Murciélago, Lamborghini?s top model. There?s a duffel-size front trunk that holds a six-CD player hostage, and a stingy view out the back. But otherwise, the Gallardo is the most livable, accommodating Lamborghini ever, enough that a hard-core owner who has no nagging spinal issues could consider driving one every day. In one example, a clever console switch raises the Gallardo?s pavement-sniffing nose at low speeds to keep it from grinding on every gas-station driveway. At the car?s center, the engine is visible under a clear polycarbonate window like a mouth-watering cannoli in a display case. The V-10 is connected to all four 19-inch wheels via what Lamborghini calls the e-gear.This automated manual transmission can be balky, especially in its automatic mode. Hit the sport button on the console and paddle-activated downshifts are accompanied by a thrilling blip of the throttle and a vertebra-snapping gear change (in just two-tenths of a second).Around town, the brakes ? the test car had optional $15,600 carbon-composite rotors ? are fiendishly hard to modulate. They moved from a vague scrubbing of speed to kiss-the-windshield braking in just an inch of pedal travel. I eventually learned to cope with their hair-trigger operation.As the Gallardo escaped the city and roared up the Hudson Valley, the mighty engine, transmission and brakes began to sing in harmony. And if the handling fell just shy of the perfection of, say, a Ferrari F430, the Lamborghini?s personna was appealingly different from its Maranello rival. It is a hairy, lusty King Kong in a designer suit. Its appetite is equally lusty: I recorded 11 m.p.g. Premium-grade guzzling is enabled by an enormous 24-gallon tank, though the balky gauge in my test car never read below three-quarters full.Sure, the Dodge Viper or Corvette Z06 will circle a racecourse just as quickly, and they cost roughly as much as the Gallardo?s floor mats. (Yes, I?m kidding: the floor mats were only $650.) But one?s a Dodge, one?s a Chevy and one?s an Italian exotic. So it all makes sense. At least for the guy selling the Italian exotic. If that salesman needs another hook, he might mention the relative rarity of the supercars from Sant?Agata Bolognese. Last fall, more than 3,000 Ferraris were registered in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut ? but only about 440 Lamborghinis. If you ever want to understand why some people are willing to part with $246,000 for a Lamborghini, one day with a bright-yellow Gallardo Superleggera will make it all clear. People gawp and gape and wind down their windows to mouth the words "wow" and, in the case of spotty teenagers, "sick." Strangers become emboldened to ring your doorbell on a Saturday afternoon and beg for a closer look. Others will tail you home at 11 p.m., like pesky magnets, in pursuit of a closer look at a car that is a common sight only at Lamborghini's plant in Sant'Agata Bolognese in northern Italy and possibly at South Beach in Florida. The Superleggera is the hard-core version of Lambo's entry-level supercar, the Gallardo, trimmed of 126 pounds, thanks to the extensive use of Superman-hard but lightweight carbon fiber. The engine cover, the rear diffuser, the underbody cover, the exterior mirrors, the rear spoiler, the side sills, and the inner door panels are all made of carbon fiber, and some of the glass?the rear window, for one?has been replaced with lighter-weight polycarbonate. Removing 126 pounds from a supercar is a good thing, but bear in mind that the 3434-pound curb weight is hardly light, as declared by the Italian term superleggera ("super light"). While Lamborghini was shedding weight, it added 11 horsepower to the already enormous 512 horsepower that the Gallardo makes from its 5.0-liter V-10 engine. According to Lamborghini, the power increase came from changes to the engine software and a bigger intake manifold. Torque remains at 376 pound-feet, peaking at 4250 rpm. The six-speed e-gear automated manual transmission is a no-cost alternative to the six-speed manual. Lamborghini has fitted the 19-inch wheels with sticky Pirelli P Zero Corsa rubber that is optional on the base Gallardo. The suspension settings are carried over, according to Lamborghini. Carbon-ceramic brakes are an option on the Superleggera and were fitted to our test car for a whopping $15,600. (Porsche charges about $8800 for this type of brake, and Ferrari wants somewhere around $22,000 for carbon rotors on the F430.) In addition to all the carbon-fiber pieces inside and out, the Superleggera gets a number of interior changes, including Alcantara, a synthetic suede, in place of leather on the dashboard. European versions get special lightweight bucket seats, but the U.S.-bound cars have the Gallardo's optional sport seats, which weigh 66 more pounds than the buckets because they have built-in side airbags. The car certainly looks fantastic. The Gallardo may be four years old, but its shape still turns heads almost off their necks. Especially in bright Midas Yellow. Inside, the dark-gray Alcantara is relieved by yellow stitching and motifs that would look gauche in a Corvette but somehow work in a Lambo. The carbon-fiber inserts and inner door panels look terrific, but the numbers on the dials are tricky to read. Unlike Lambos of yore, in which electrical items and the air conditioner had the faithfulness of Wilt Chamberlain, the audio, HVAC, and navigation systems in this car work perfectly. Put that down to corporate overlord Audi's influence. The squared-off steering wheel has a cheesy plastic piece screwed onto its base, but we didn't hear any complaints about the driving position or the visibility from inside this mid-engined car. There certainly weren't any negative comments about the Superleggera's engine. It sounds sensational, the noise building from a rambunctious bellow low down in the rev range to a guttural bark as the tach needle climbs toward the 8000-rpm redline. Like a Ferrari F430, you consciously head for bridges and tunnels with the windows down, just to hear the exhaust note reverb. Flick the left-hand paddle shifter at high revs, and there's an instant blip of soaring engine revs to enhance the effect. The engine is pretty flexible, with plenty of thrust from 3000 rpm up. There's lots of urge in a straight line, too. We recorded a 0-to-60 time of 3.5 seconds, 0.6 second better than the first Gallardo we tested [February 2004], with 0 to 100 mph coming in 7.9 seconds (versus 9.2) and the quarter-mile taking 11.7 seconds at 123 mph (versus 12.4 at 118). Those numbers are right up there with the best we have seen for cars such as the Porsche 911 Turbo, the Corvette Z06, and the latest Dodge Viper.The e-gear transmission has its good and bad points. In automatic mode, the shifts are clunky and never quite happen when you expect them to. If you resort to manual mode, effected by a pair of elegant, fixed paddles on either side of the steering column, it works much better. If smoothness is a goal, avoid sport mode, where shifts are very fast?about 0.2 second each?and brutal enough to jerk your neck back and forth. For drivers desperate to impress bystanders, we recommend a launch-control start. Since the Gallardo was introduced, this procedure has been revised. Now the driver simply puts the car into gear, switches off the stability control, engages the sport mode, releases any pressure on either pedal, and then stomps on the gas. The engine revs to about 5000 rpm, the clutch is dumped, all four wheels spin, and the car departs like a cat on a lighted range. With its soft and sticky Pirellis, we expected better than 0.97 g on the skidpad, especially since that '04 Gallardo had managed 1.00 g. This may have been because of some overly exuberant lapping at GingerMan Raceway the evening before the car was tested, leaving the P Zero Corsas in less than pristine condition. The Superleggera certainly performed well enough on the track, recording lap times comparable with those of a Z06. With its stiffened suspension and improved power-to-weight ratio over the Gallardo, the Superleggera feels like a more finely honed weapon at max attack. The steering is nicely weighted and has plenty of feel (if not as much communication as a Porsche GT3's or Ferrari F430's), and the handling is reasonably idiot-proof. There's initial understeer that mutates into neutrality with the application of power. The car drifts nicely, but you have to provoke it mightily to get the tail sliding with the stability system switched off. On the street, it just cleaves its way through corners. The ride is firm but relatively supple, although expansion joints and potholes crash through the body structure with jack-hammer ferocity. So far, so good. The only problem with the Superleggera came in stopping it. The car manages the 70-mph-to-standstill braking test in a stellar 150 feet, and the anchors work fine on the track. But the brake-pedal feel, at anything other than full retardation, is awful. We can't recall anything with brakes this sensitive, a trait that isn't helped by the clutch seemingly grabbing on downshifts. Virtually all our drivers embarrassingly lurched to a halt at a stoplight, no doubt encouraging other drivers to think uncharitably about their driving prowess. Fuel consumption wasn't exactly a strong point, either, with an overall figure of 12 mpg in our hands. The Superleggera is a sensational car, but it's also hugely expensive at a base price of $224,800, a premium of nearly $30,000 over the base Gallardo. Our test car, optioned with carbon-ceramic brakes, a leather steering wheel ($650), an anti-theft system ($665), floor mats ($650), a navigation system ($3250), and the Travel package ($360), ran to a cool $245,975. It sounds like a lot of extra money over a Gallardo, but a Superleggera is a good $100,000 less than a comparably equipped Murciélago LP640, about as quick in a straight line, and a lot less of a handful on a track. If you look at it that way, it's something of a bargain for Lambo fanciers.

ORIGINS OF A NAME
The literal translation for superleggera is "super light." The term was most widely used by Touring of Milan, an Italian body designer and builder, although its intention was to describe a form of light and rigid body construction where aluminum panels were wrapped around a framework of small-diameter steel tubes. Among the cars fitted with superleggera bodywork were the Aston Martin DB4 and DB5 and the Ferrari 166MM Barchetta.