For Lamborghini, the S should stand for stunning
LIVIGNO, ITALY— You’d think that with your flagship car being only six years old, still with stunning styling and loads of performance from a 700 horsepower V12 engine, you could afford to rest on your laurels a little.
Not if you want to succeed at the very sharpest end of the supercar field.
And not if your brand name is Lamborghini.
Because Ferrari doesn’t hang around, and since the Aventador was introduced, McLaren has become a major player in this game.
The Aventador was really about two things — stunning looks, stunning engine.
The new S model tweaks the former with wider grille openings, added vents to move all that air around and a deployable rear wing to tailor downforce, as needed.
You’d think increasing horsepower by 40 to 740 (on the European scale; for us, we’d probably now say 730) would be the big mechanical story.
Nope. While various engine mods have been applied, peak torque is only up by a single pound-foot; most of the added power comes from a higher rev limit.
Higher revs? Can that make this engine sound even better than it already does? Oh, yes.
Lamborghini claims the same 0-100 km/h number as before — 2.9 seconds.
Hardly shabby, but you’d think 40 more cavallini would yield a bigger increase than that.
No, the big news is Lamborghini’s first application of rear-wheel steering.
Electromechanical actuators can steer the rear wheels up to 1.5 degrees in phase with the fronts for more stable high-speed manoeuvres, or up to three degrees counterphase for more agility at lower speeds.
Lorenzo Rinaldi, head of vehicle dynamics R& D for Lamborghini, says the former is equivalent to increasing the wheelbase by 700 millimetres, the latter to shortening it by 500 mm.
Now, four-wheel steering is hardly new. Mazda and Honda messed with it — geez, 30 years ago. At that time, it was the answer to the question nobody asked. Today, several very high-powered cars offer it because it may be the only way to drive both power and agility forward simultaneously.
I didn’t have the advantage of being able to drive an S and a “non-S” back-to-back. But some of the instructors at the Lamborghini Winter Driving program I was attending had done just that and said the difference was night and day.
It wasn’t just how much more agile and stable the car felt. Lap times were considerably better, too. It felt better, it WAS better.
Now, part of that might be attributable to massive new tires developed specifically by Pirelli for this car.
The magnetorheological dampers (Magnaride to GM cognoscenti) have also been reworked to provide both better control and better ride.
The front-to-rear torque split of the four-wheel drive system depends on the mode setting you choose. “Strada” (street) gives you 40/60. “Sport” (well, sport) gives you 10/90. “Corsa” (race) backs that off to 20/80.
If that latter data point sounds surprising, the point is that for ultimate lap times, a higher percentage of front-wheel pull is the answer. By sport, they seem to be saying “you’re just messing around” and the 10/90 ratio allows you to get into lurid drifts more easily. Not the fast way, just the most spectacular.
The control for these modes also affects throttle response, shift quality and speed, and damper settings. Many drivers actually prefer Sport on a race track because Corsa makes the throttle almost too jumpy, too hard to modulate when trying to balance the car in a high-speed corner.
For the first time, there is also an “EGO” setting, which allows the driver to independently select settings for each of the attributes rather than getting them all set to preestablished levels.
So, you might choose Strada for dampers for smooth ride, Corsa for steering and Sport for throttle and transmission.
And EGO doesn’t seem to carry quite the same connotation in Italian as it does in English.
It just suggests “self” and applies to the settings you as an individual choose.
The main drawback to the Aventador has always been the singleclutch manumatic transmission, when virtually everybody else has gone to a dual-clutch setup. Especially in Corsa mode, up- or downshifts feel like you’ve been kicked in the butt by a mule.
You can mitigate this to a degree by easing off/blipping the throttle during the up- and downshift process, but you’ll always know it’s shifting.
Lamborghini says with the huge engine effectively pointing backwards, the transmission must sit between the seats and a bulkier dual-clutch unit simply wouldn’t fit.
If you want the rest of the joys of driving an Aventador (or Aventador S), you’ll just have to learn to live with this.
Until today, I don’t think I have ever conducted a preview test exclusively on snow and ice. But, both Kia Stinger and Lamborghini Aventador S have broken that streak.
Especially with a car as powerful as the Aventador S, this actually provided an opportunity I might never have had otherwise, a chance to put the car into a series of slides and spins that, if attempted on dry pavement, would surely have ended in tears, not to mention shredded carbon fibre.
The Aventador S is also an obvious example of “if you have to ask its price, you can’t afford it.” But it’s $463,775, excluding taxes.
There probably are some who own both, but there seem to be Ferrari people and Lamborghini people, with McLaren people now coming on strong, too.
The Aventador used to be all about the sense of occasion and the straight-line speed.
Those are still there in the S version, but now you have some deftness when the road starts to bend.
And that’s a very good thing, indeed.