Dressed in a navy blue suit fitted as if he’d been sewn into it, Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winkelmann stood in front of us journalists at the welcome dinner for the 2016 Aventador Superveloce drive event and toasted his company’s latest supercar.

“Thank you for joining us on this drive,” Winkelmann said, lightly raising a crystal flute of gold champagne toward the blue skies of Barcelona. “The weather will be good and you will be fast. Salute.” With that, he took a sip, set the flute down on a nearby table, and walked out of the room – the CEO’s version of a mic drop.

Though I was hugely amused with Winkelmann’s abrupt entrance, toast, and exit, in that moment I had no idea how right he was. For not only would the weather the following day be perfect, so, too, would be the Aventador LP 750-4 Superveloce.

On lap nine of 16, entering the long Renault corner of the Circuit de Catalunya, I rolled on the throttle and the Aventador Superveloce’s (SV) V12 bellowed a mighty roar. Despite four of the stickiest Pirelli tires known to man and a Haldex all-wheel drive system so stout that would make a tank envious, the SV was four-wheel drifting through long, sweeping right-hander.

Without thinking, I found myself instinctively shouting over the vicious V12 howl, “Time to cowboy up! Woooooo!” I still don’t know what I meant by that, but it just seemed right – and still does. Four-wheel drifting a 750-horsepower, near-as-makes-no-difference $500,000 supercar on a Formula 1 track is perhaps one of the most death-defying but also enlivening things I’ve ever done. It makes you happy to be alive, because there’s a real chance that, if something went wrong, you might not be for very long.