“I can’t believe we forgot to invite Lamborghini,” my coworkers laughed, standing next to an eye-searingly orange Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica, a car that we very much did invite to the 2023 Performance Car of the Year. This was my first time at the test, I’d never driven a Lamborghini, and I was just starting to get the joke.

Welcome to the run-up to Performance Car of the Year 2023. This year we’ll be running breakout stories on each of our 10 contenders twice a week, every week until the full all-out comparison goes live the third week of January. Let’s get into it.

Every time it came to swap keys around, everyone gravitated towards a few very new cars, cars that we absolutely had to drive. There was a new Z06. There was a new Civic Type R. There was a new AWD Toyota turbo hatch nobody had tried, and a Porsche Cayman GT4RS that had everyone reeling as they got out of it. It was perhaps more important to my fellow road testers that these cars were really new than they were necessarily good or bad to drive. They were curious.

Nobody was all that curious about the Lamborghini. That made sense; the Huracán has been around since 2014, the facelifted version since 2019, and while the Huracán Tecnica is new for 2022 it is mostly a road-friendly re-tune of the Huracán STO that they all drove in 2021. Not me, though. I’d never driven a Lamborghini. I, myself, was overflowing…