The rocket’s yellow glare

In my quest for ever-more interesting ways to be incarcerated, I petitioned Lamborghini for the key to its new, unwholesomely fast Gallardo, painted in a lurid shade of Signal Yellow.

Hewn with a light saber from a solid slab of Italian gawdamighty, the outrageous mid-engine exotic grabs people by the visual cortex and just won’t let go. It’s fun to lip-read conversations in cars around it, where earnest discussions of world affairs suddenly are sundered by “Oh ... my ... God! Look at that car! What is it?” Heads swivel, “Exorcist”-style. Whole families do a version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”

You can’t take your eyes off the Gallardo. It’s like Donald Trump’s hair.

The 2004 Gallardo ($177,200) is the second all-new car to come out of Sant’Agata since Audi put its ring through the Italian bull’s nose in 1998. The jackknife-doored Murcielago, introduced two years ago, replaced the Diablo, which along with Carmen Electra and the psychedelic marijuana leaf was one of the world’s great dorm-room posters. The 572-horsepower, 12-cylinder Murcielago starship offers the kind of blushing modesty that rap stars, NBA players and porn moguls crave. Yes, it’s a terribly fast car, but it’s primarily enfante terrible.

The Gallardo is a smaller and eminently more realistic sibling to the $280,000 Murcielago. I haven’t driven that car, but I have handled other Lambo wide-bodies, and maneuvering them in tight quarters -- say, on a canyon twisty -- is like fencing with a broadsword. They are big and hard to see out of, raucous and raunchy, and they consume unhealthy amounts of opposing traffic’s real estate.

The Gallardo, on the other hand, is surprisingly compact, about the size of an Acura NSX or a Porsche 911. It slips through narrow canyon roads like a rapier between a Capulet’s ribs.

Although visually quieter than the Murcielago, the Gallardo -- with its Kabuki-mask scowl, acres of angles and off-the-Pantone-chart yellow -- isn’t what one would call stealthy, drawing the attention of blue-chinned men with guns and badges and helicopters who invite you to sample the region’s institutional cuisine.

My weekend trip took me from Los Angeles to picturesque Laughlin, Nev. (Civic motto: The casino town with the enlarged heart.) On Interstate 40, across California’s Mojave Desert, the speed limit is 70 mph. Most people think nothing of going 100 mph. But I knew that even if I only went with the flow of traffic, the flagrantly supra-legal Gallardo would be singled out for punishment, cavity searches and the like.

I don’t blame law enforcement types. The 493-horsepower, six-speed, 192-mph Gallardo is a rolling affront to their authority. It’s like throwing a fancy dinner party and seating the gay Rastafarian next to John Ashcroft. You just know there’s going to be trouble.

And so I found myself being passed by Toyota Camrys, Chevy Impalas and camper-pulling pickups, their passengers peering into the Gallardo’s black-glass canopy, wondering how Granny got the keys to the Lambo.

There ought to be some sort of index for speed limits that accounts for the kind of vehicle the subject is driving. From my bumper-height vantage point, I watched with a fixated horror as full-size SUVs hurtled past me at three-digit speeds, their suspensions heaving and wobbling under 3 tons of body-on-frame mass. These people don’t know it, but they are driving on the very ragged edge of vehicle control. All it would take is one Igloo cooler blown from a pickup bed to send them crashing into the Jersey barriers or into the tumbleweed hereafter.

In terms of active safety -- which is to say the power to avoid an accident before it happens -- the Gallardo is incredibly safe. It ought to get some sort of special dispensation, and not just from the Pope, although it is Italian.

For one thing, the Gallardo has a sophisticated all-wheel-drive system churning the hot-and-sticky Pirellis. The AWD powertrain distributes torque with semiconductor speed to the wheels with the best traction, so that in all but the most radical maneuvers traction is optimized at all four wheels. Combine that with the Pirelli P-Zero Rosso’s huge footprints, the car’s aerodynamic stability and a center of gravity deep in the mantle of the Earth, and you have a car whose sheer mechanical grip is far beyond the powers and abilities of mortal men.

Then there are the binders: Shining behind the horologic-style wheels are huge vented and cross-drilled brake rotors, gripped by eight-piston front calipers and four-piston rears. Go ahead. Grab a foot-full of brake at speed in the Gallardo. It’s like driving an offshore racing boat and hitting Bermuda.

In addition, the Gallardo’s simple but effective double-wishbone, coil-over suspension is tuned just so, giving the car superb dynamic balance. This car could give Switzerland lessons in being neutral. I suppose if you push it hard enough you could make the car understeer -- that is, cause the front wheels to slide instead of biting in the direction of the turn -- but you would need a mighty big Ouija board to conjure these spirits from the Gallardo.

Standing by, ready to catch the inept and insane, are the Gallardo’s traction and stability controls. The Sport button raises the threshold of intervention as well as sharpens the automated gear shifting in the Marelli-supplied six-speed sequential gearbox, but even in Sport mode the margin of safety is considerable.

At the end of the day -- which comes all too soon in a borrowed Lamborghini -- this car is so fantastically overqualified that it seems simply wrong to hold it to the same motor vehicle code as beer- bellied sport utility vehicles and minivans. You guys in the antelope-skin driving shoes ... Can I get a witness?

It is possible to switch off the electronic nannies altogether. In a high-performance rear-drive car -- like the Ferrari 575 Maranello -- this allows you to decorate the macadam with 100-foot streaks of molten Pirelli. But in the AWD Gallardo’s full-launch sequence, you can barely get the tires to squeak, which is more than you can say for your passengers.

It works like this: Find a nice, lonely piece of asphalt, preferably outside U.S. territorial limits. Pull both shifter paddles behind the steering wheel toward you. This tells the electrohydraulic E-gear mechanism to engage neutral. Put your right foot on the oversize brake pedal. Engage Sport mode. Pull back on the right upshift paddle to engage first gear. Please discontinue use of all cellphones and two-way pagers.

Stomp it. The car’s computer lets the revs build to about 2,500 before dropping the single-plate dry clutch. The next sensation is like catching a Big Bertha right between the shoulder blades. Ka-schwang! All four tires bite, a slurring moan comes from the differentials, and a 10-cylinder, snot-flinging snarl fills the cabin, along with the faint reek of clutch. In 4.1 seconds, before you come to the end of first gear (8,100 rpm), you have crossed the 60-mph threshold, and the Gallardo, God bless it, is just getting warmed up. Two gears and six seconds later, you’ll cross into blurry, three-digit territory.

Remember, fresh meat gets the bottom bunk.

The fact that the Gallardo is fast hardly qualifies as news. What’s surprising is how civilized it is. For instance, the steering rack ratio -- how quickly the wheels turn relative to the steering angle -- is fairly low for an exotic, so it has little of the dartiness of some mid-engine license eaters. Also, the Lambo has a strong self-centering feel. The result is a car that has excellent straight-line manners yet can carve corners like a skier.

The Gallardo owes much of its everyday civility to corporate parent Audi, whose ample corncrib of parts provides the audio and climate controls, AWD and assorted subsystems. Sure, it’s stiffly sprung, but its aluminum space-frame chassis, dense suspension bushings and clever spring-and-shock tuning give it unusually good ride compliance for an exotic -- hey, it rides better than a John Cooper Works edition Mini. Moreover, the headlights work, the windshield wipers wipe. If you have written a six-figure check for a car, these things matter.

With its 4-cubic-foot trunk, SlimFast seats and hovercraft ride height, the Gallardo is not a daily driver. But it’s certainly a car for three-day weekends -- three days, with time off for good behavior.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

2004 Lamborghini Gallardo

Wheelbase: 100.8 inches

Length: 169.3 inches

Powertrain: 5.0-liter, 40-valve, dual-overhead cam V-10; six-speed sequential transmission with electrohydraulic shift actuation; all-wheel drive with viscous-coupling center differential, limited-slip rear differential, open front differential

Horsepower: 493 at 7,800 rpm

Torque: 376 pound-feet at 4,500 rpm

Acceleration: Zero to 60 mph in 4.1 seconds

Top speed: 192 mph

EPA fuel rating: 10 miles per gallon city, 17 mpg highway

Price, as tested: $177,200 (includes $5,400 gas guzzler tax, $1,300 delivery)

Final thoughts: Felonious intent

Source: Lamborghini, Car and Driver

Times automotive critic Dan Neil can be reached at dan.neil@latimes.com.