Kyle arrives in his Carbon 65 Edition Corvette Grand Sport to give me a lift the Lamborghini Beverly Hills service center where I'm picking up my Performante. (Anticipating one of my concern, he gleefully points out how the 'Vette has room for all three of my bags and his corpse-sized satchel of laundry before we've even left the airport.) It turns out, I'm informed as I arrive at the pickup point, that there's been a slight change of plans: While I was originally scheduled for a white Huracan Performante , track-day battle damage has taken it out of commission; I'll be driving a green one instead. I don't usually name cars, but this one seems deserving. Henceforth, it shall be known as: The Green Meanie.

Climbing off the plane at LAX leaves me feeling a bit like John McLane in the first few minutes of Die Hard : A calloused New Yorker shell-shocked by his sudden arrival in a land where nuance is a dirty word. As if a celebrity sighting weren't enough—not only was John Lithgow sitting three rows ahead of me on my flight, there was a driver holding his name up on a sign at arrivals to drive the point home—I find myself literally in the midst of a movie shoot as I wait at the curb for The Drive's West Coast editor Kyle Cheromcha to pick me up, with two actors, a cameraman, and a director circling me. Because foreshadowing is best delivered by the ton, they're filming a scene where the actors climb into, of all the cars out there, a Lamborghini Huracan.

Which is where your humble author comes in. One of the job requirements of being a journalist is, to put it simply, to do things most people wouldn't dare. For the braver ones, that means embedding with the Hell's Angels or following soldiers into combat; for the more noble ones, it means spending months in refugee camps or prisons to report on the horrors found there. And for automotive journalists, it means doing things like cramming a 631-horsepower Lamborghini with a $275,000 base price that lapped the Nurburgring Nordschleife in six minutes and 52 seconds full of outdoor gear and setting off on a camping trip through some of America's most picturesque national parks.

See, car camping out of any supercar, as anyone with two brain cells to scrape together could sort out, is a pretty foolish endeavor. Nebulous as the definition of a supercar may be, most people can agree on a few traits: they’re fast, they have two doors, and they’re anything but utilitarian. As such, none of the one-percenters who actually have own these sorts of cars are likely to try it; if you’ve got the guap to park a supercar in your garage, you probably also own at least one or two other vehicles that would be better suited to such an expedition by virtue of being anything but a supercar.

In case you're the lazy sort who often gives up halfway through a story, I’ll give you what the kids call the "TL;DR" right now: It’s pretty stupid to go camping in a Lamborghini Huracan Performante .

The shock of the sight of the Kermit-colored Lamborghini waiting patiently for me quickly fades as I start playing mental Tetris with the interior and my bags. The frunk barely holds my orange Victorinox backpack crammed with six days of clothes, and the passenger’s footwell is barely big enough for my messenger bag; I’m forced to plop my giant plump duffel across the entire passenger’s seat. It’s loaded up to the gunwales, and I haven’t even bought food yet. Nevertheless, feeling a bit like a pimento, I squeeze into the green machine and push off into Los Angeles traffic. Mastering the Huracan’s eccentricities from a cold open is a bit...awkward. It takes six blocks to realize that the front-axle lifter is on, leaving the prow aloft; that's easily solved with the flip of a dashboard toggle. Less obvious are the blinkers, controlled by what amounts to a sideways-mounted light switch near the left-thumb's spot on the steering wheel. But unlike a light switch, there’s no apparent way to manually turn them off at first blush; pushing them in the opposite direction just turns on the blinker on the other side. I spend several miles of the 405 with the left blinker clicking away, as though the car were prodding me to move into non-existent, ever-faster-moving lanes. (The solution, as it turns out: Push the switch in.) Still, following Kyle's Corvette onto the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica en route to Malibu's canyons, the Performante prove itself a willing (if high-strung) cruiser. That parenthetical manifests itself most prominently not in the steering ratio or the suspension, but in the short gears; 75 miles per hour sees the engine turning 3,000 rpm in seventh. It makes for one hell of a responsive drive—that naturally-aspirated V-10 makes all its power up high—but it leaves the driver wishing for a gentler overdrive on the open road.

Will Sabel Courtney Oh, hi Kyle.

Then Kyle signals a turn onto one of his favorite Malibu roads...and the chase is on. And it ends about one minute later, when he pulls over and waves me past. From there, it’s not even a competition; the Lambo tears away from the Vette, opening the gap until I slow down for sanity’s sake for the next of a thousand blind curves. This car is…unreal. Saying it handles Malibu’s canyons with ease is like saying Superman doesn’t have trouble opening a jar of pickles. The grip is out of this world; the power builds fast in each gear, escalating smoothly all the way up towards the 8,500-rpm redline. I don’t dare look down to see how fast I’m going—the turns are coming too quickly, they need every ounce of attention I can muster—but I know it’s fast enough to make the Pirelli PZero Corsas squeal. One hour in this car, and it's already clear how special it is, even by supercar standards.

Will Sabel Courtney Vette. Lambo. Go

We do another quick lap of Kyle’s favorite canyon loop, then part ways. Now comes the shitty part, the karmic comeuppance for that backroad fun: Google Maps says it’s two hours and 20 minutes to my hotel, most of it slogging through rush-hour traffic. And it’s started to rain—never a good sign for speedy progress in California. Which is how I discover the Performante is, astoundingly, a pretty good commuter car. The 10-speaker, 390-watt Sensonum audio system plays satellite radio and Spotify alike crisply and clearly, the racetrack-tuned suspension is shockingly smooth, and the dual-clutch gearbox slips from cog to cog without fuss in automatic mode. Hell, it even has Apple CarPlay. My biggest complaint stems from the car’s lack of room for my giant legs, especially with my feet clad in hiking boots. I’m left splaying my legs out at such an angle that the bolsters of the lower seat cushion dig into my quadriceps with a growing numbness that leaves me hypochondriacally thinking of deep-vein thrombosis. The roads and skies alike clear up going into the valley outside of Palmdale. I booked my hotel months ago, somewhere between that town and nearby Edwards Air Force Base, in ambitious hopes of an easy midnight run outside to catch a glimpse of some secret aircraft taking off. But my reach clearly exceeded my grasp on that one; after an early reveille, a transcontinental flight, the adrenaline spike from canyon carving, and the two-plus hour commute, all I want is a beer, a bite, and a bed for eight or nine hours. My heart soars as I see the signs for Palmdale…then sinks, as Google tells me I still have 15 miles to go. On the map, the two areas looked like adjacent neighborhoods; the scale of real life proves something else entirely. By the time I pull off at my exit and spot my hotel—sandwiched between the off-ramp and a gas station—my heart’s gone past my stomach and dragged it down to keep my liver company. While it seemed fine on Priceline, in person, it’s the sort of run-down place where you probably would be fine for the night if you kept to yourself and didn’t give any indication you had something worth stealing…or, in other words, if you were doing the exact opposite of parking a bright-green Lamborghini with a giant spoiler outside your room. I whip a U-turn and blast south with the fading sun dipping over the mountains on my right; by the time it’s set, there’s a room at the Residence Inn in Palmdale with my name on it. Day 2: "Google Maps doesn't work well here" Repacking the car come morning—after an expeditionary voyage to Target and Trader Joe's for some final provisions—takes several minutes of rummaging around in the hotel parking lot, but by the time I'm done, everything seems locked in tight. My Therm-a-Rest sleeping pad—thick with memory foam, which should be great for sleeping but makes packing a pain—is wedged on the shelf behind the seats, pinned down by the back of the passenger’s side bucket; the loose space in the cargo compartment and the cabin alike is now filled with foodstuffs, tools, and other assorted goodies needed for several days of camping. And hey, there’s still enough room left for...a small dog. Heading northbound on the highway towards Mojave, I watch giant jets make lazy circles in the sky. An American Airlines 767 makes what could well be its last flight before being put to rest in the boneyard there; it’s low enough that I can make out the pinpricks of windows along the fuselage. I wonder if anyone on board spots the fluorescent Lambo below. Once through the town, though, there’s…zilch. Just wide open desert and straight, flat, roads. Keeping the Lambo at—okay, near—the speed limit feels torturous, so I set the cruise control—while simultaneously shaking my head that a car that can lap the 'Ring in less than seven minutes has cruise control—and settle into an 80-mph lope. After an interminable 40 minutes—broken up only by the regular KLUNK of my radar detector falling after separating from the magnetic backing plate for the aftermarket windshield mount I bought after forgetting the original one at home—my turnoff comes: Highway 178, a road chosen this morning after noticing its serpentine shape on the map. If the way before seemed like a chore, this stretch is the reward; mile after mile of turns rising up into the mountains abutting the southern edge of Sequoia National Forest. I crack past one family car after another—at first, only where the dashed center lines mark official passing zones, but soon enough anywhere the coast is clear. It’s too easy, too much fun; click down two or three gears with the left-hand paddle, squeeze on the throttle, and let the engine sing as I blast past one overloaded Subaru after another.

Will Sabel Courtney

But the fucking radar detector—which is now falling off every 17 seconds or so—gets to be too much. I stop at an eccentric general store in the tiny town of Onyx, where the middle-aged proprietor making sandwiches for a woman and her young son is happy to point me in the direction of some glue. Two dollars, a dollop of superglue, and five minutes of pressure later, the Passport’s grip on its magnetic plate is unbreakable, and it's back on the road. The mountains open up, revealing tiny farm towns nestled between their peaks, then parting farther to reveal the cool blue expanse of Isabella Lake. The fast route to Sequoia National Park leads straight, but the roads around here are too good; I’m not ready to come down from this high. I divert to another route, pushing deeper into the mountains. The Green Meanie and I cruise through a small town, bang a left, and then… ...we're in heaven.

Will Sabel Courtney

A boundless buffet of sweeping curves, decreasing-radius turns, on- and off-camber twists leading into the national forest—and best of all, it's completely barren of traffic on this Wednesday afternoon. The Huracan screams with glee, exhaust note bouncing off the mountainsides as it pounds the road into submission. Some supercars are cold, clinical things designed for speed above sensation, while others are hot, visceral monsters designed more for showing off than lapping tracks. The Performante, though, is the Goldilocks median. Winding up and down the conifer-lined slopes, it carves through turns with a prefect blend of liveliness and velocity—fast as a Lamborghini should be, but also every bit as nimble and accessible as a Miata. It feels like the ultimate Porsche Cayman, somehow channeling that telepathic connection, those instant reactions, that perfect balance. Maybe it’s the Nurburgring connection; Porsche’s been using that track as its development playground for decades, so it shouldn’t be surprising that this Lambo feels so similar. But all good roads must come to an end, and so does this one, in a town called Glenville. Google Maps directs me straight past the one-horse town’s high school, where a baseball game comes to an involuntary time-out as the Huracan cruises by; I pop it in neutral and rev the engine to redline a couple times before speeding off, smiling like a moron. The road out of town proves nearly as exciting as the forest, in its own way; it carves a fast, winding course through some of the most gorgeous farmland I’ve ever seen, California’s version of New England’s verdant pastures, tree-lined fields, and cell-coverage-lacking valleys. (Google Maps craps out on me at one point; as a result, I take a 20-minute accidental detour down ever-smaller, increasingly-ragged roads, until I finally come to my senses and turn around.)

Will Sabel Courtney

Forested farms give way to rolling fields filled with cattle and amber waves of grasses, which in turn fade into endless rows of citrus as I drop into the Central Valley, where the road straightens out and fills with afternoon traffic. I bang a right onto Route 198 at a giant sign in support for congressman Devin Nunez–—guess this is the district he represents when he’s not puckering up to Donald Trump—and start the climb to the evening's destination: Sequoia National Park. Threatening clouds are rolling over the peaks and the sun is getting low, but there’s still time for a quick pit stop in Three Rivers, the last town before hitting the park, to grab a six-pack of beer and a sandwich for dinner. While waiting for my food at a local deli called Sierra Subs and Salads, a tourist wanders in asking for the best way into the park, claiming his phone is giving him odd directions. “Google Maps doesn’t work well up here,” the dark-haired woman behind the counter says with a knowing smile. I know that tale, lady.

Will Sabel Courtney

I hit the park at 5:00 p.m. on the dot; while the ranger at the gate doesn't comment on the Huracan, she does ask if I'm an active member of the military, based on the color of my duffel. (Considering how much the average soldier makes and the pricetag of a Lamborghini, it seems safe to assume she's not a car person.) The road to the campground winds even tighter than the ones I was cavorting on earlier, but the strict 25-mph speed limit and the bounty of tourist traffic mean the several miles to the park's Buckeye Flats campground takes longer than I'd like, but by 5:30, the Performante is parked for the night in a spot beside a rushing mountain river. Unpacking camping equipment from a supercar turns out to be a bigger hassle than packing it in, because a) all the food and toiletries have to be carted straight into the campsite's metal bear-proof lockbox (the omnipresent signs make clear that, much like the Wu-Tang Clan, Sequoia's bears ain't nuthin' to fuck with), and b) I have to set everything up for the night. It's not difficult—muscle memory from childhood camping expeditions make setting up the Big Agnes tent a snap—but it is time-consuming when you have to do it solo. Between the tent, the sleeping pad, the sleeping bag, the quilt, and my bags, unpacking and setting up takes the better part of an hour. Scrounging up firewood from the nearby forest takes another 20 minutes or so, but by twilight, I'm sitting by the fire with a beer, reading The Wall Street Journal and soaking up the nature.

Will Sabel Courtney Campsite: Complete.

One of the many marmots scurrying about disappears beneath the Performante; intrigued, I grab my flashlight and cast the beam beneath the car in search of the critter...when is when I spy a chunk of dangling carbon-fiber, positioned above what looks like a fluid patch on the ground. Fuck, my mind screams, as it power-dives to a dark place. Did I rip a hole in this thing? No, no way. I'd have noticed. Must be from before I got the car. Does that mean it's been leaking all this time? What is that stuff?

Will Sabel Courtney DEAR GOD WHY

I pull the car out a few feet, drop to the ground and sniff the stains on the asphalt; they have an odd, petrochemical scent I can't identify. I spin the Lambo 180 degrees and park it the other way, so any further leaks will leave new stains and let me better gauge how fast the mystery fluid is flowing. Frantic plans for worst-case scenarios—if it won't start, I'll have to hitch a ride down to town and call the Lamborghini people, then I can start trying to work out a car for the rest of my trip, but maybe it'll last long enough for me to limp back to L.A. if I have to, I'll make it work, damnit—flit through my brain, until sleep finally grabs me around 9 o'clock. Day 3: Will Sabel Courtney and the Three Bears Sleeping outside for the first time in years leaves me tossing and turning all night, waking five or six times to the sound of a ruffling tent and the mental image of a bear on the other side of it. Still, I sleep through until 7:30 a.m., when I pull myself out free of the grogginess that threatens to drag me under once more to find everyone else in the campground packing up or already gone. It takes a full hour to finish waking up, break down the site, and pack it all back into the Lamborghini.

Will Sabel Courtney

My original plan had been to descend to the welcome center and buy a trail map before braving the heavily-under-construction road up to see the park's eponymous trees—but when I reach the main road, the charm of the path heading to the sequoias proves too strong. It rises fast, dozens of switchbacks per mile as it climbs towards the narrow range of mile-plus altitudes where the mighty trees can grow; every so often, a pullout reveals a new view of the mountains that's almost hypnotic in beauty. The much-ballyhooed construction zone proves little problem—the one-way traffic switches to my direction after less than a minute in line. A few minutes through the construction zone...and it's into the land of titans. Any cynical thoughts of being prepared—ooooh, I'm gonna see some big trees—burn away at first glimpse of the sequoias in person. There's no true way to be prepared for the scale of them—their trunks stretching far beyond the top of any windshield, their trunks thicker in diameter than Chevy Suburbans are long. Their size defies human perception; the brain isn't used to such a familiar object at such an absurd scale. And they're everywhere—not just peppered about in the midst of a forest of lesser vegetation, but on every side, clogging up the flanks of the mountains. It feels like being on Monster Island from those old Godzilla movies. There's an added majesty in their ubiquity, somehow; this is their realm, and the Lamborghini and I are, like the game pieces squeaking around the jail on the Monopoly board, just visiting.

Will Sabel Courtney Yes, I was listening to Aaron Copland.

With the high-altitude visitor's center noticeably busy, I cruise on by to the parking lot near the tree called the "General Sherman," the largest living tree in the world, to fulfill my tourist duty by catching a glimpse of it. It's indeed impressive—though admittedly, not particularly more so than any of the other giants spread out over the nearby miles. But as one of the park's main attractions, the area is chock-full of visitors, many of whom seem less than respectful of the natural surroundings. (One heavyset couple, after taking stock of the sign clearly saying "NO PETS," choose to scoop their weiner dog up in their arms and bring it anyway. I consider warning them any nearby bears will look at their dachshund the way they look at a bratwurst.) A nearby map reveals a better place to commune with nature: another parking lot just up the road, with a trail leading from it through a meadow and into the heart of the park. One five-minute drive later, and the Lamborghini and I find ourselves in a parking lot on the edge of a treeline almost free of signs of humanity. Indeed, the green Huracan almost has the place to itself; I park between the only two other cars there, three vehicles in an asphalt lake made for hundreds. It takes almost 10 minutes to find the trail head—having never made the turn to buy a real map, I'm forced to depend on the pictures I snapped of the maps at the General Sherman information station—and it takes less than five more to lose the trail again, while still within sight of the parking lot. Considering the circumstances—alone in a national park, with no cell phone service and no one aware of where I am—I'm about to head back to the car when I spy the trail again; two leaps across wide streams later, and I'm finally heading into the woods. In an area where every building has a posted warning about bears, I think. With no bear spray or bear bells. In May, when they're all waking up and hungry.​ So I start to whistle. Show tunes and classic rock, at first, then just generic melodies, bouncing the notes up and down with every swivel of my head. A quarter-mile in, I start to relax a bit. Half a mile along, I'm feeling pretty in tune with my surroundings. The trail opens up along the edge of an alpine meadow—when a blur of brown motion in my peripheral sets off my spider-sense, and I freeze. Just like the large brown bear grilling me with his eyes from across the clearing does.

Will Sabel Courtney Shot on iPhone X.