TURN HEADS AND EMPTY YOUR WALLET WITH THIS RIDE.
I have an old boxing buddy who, it turns out, is a phenomenal businessman. Something about online poker, offshore Internet servers and the foresight to predict that most everyone would eventually want to get their thrills digitally.
So, while I can take some small solace that I could pepper his noggin with more jabs than he could throw back, he can actually afford to buy the cars that I merely test. In the years I have known him, he’s had everything from Range Rovers to Ferraris, but he trades his four-wheeled playthings more often than Hugh Hefner does bunnies. So, with Lamborghini approaching something like Maranellanlike respectability, he wondered whether there might be a Lambo in his future.
“There is,” I replied, “as long as it’s not the Aventador.” The new Huracán, all German engineering married to more than a facade of Italian passion, would be perfect for him. “But stay away from the Aventador,” I admonished, “once in a while, it’ll slap you upside the head with a right hook out of nowhere,” I, of course, unable to restrain a reference to my favourite punch.
More to the point, the Aventador can be a little surly. Compared with a Huracán, for instance, the Aventador’s transmission has a few quirks. At first blush, they would appear to be similar, both boasting seven forward gears and actuated by massive paddles behind the steering wheel. But, unlike the Huracán’s slick-shifting dual-clutch manumatic, the Aventador’s transmission is an older, single-clutch affair. So, although it does indeed weigh less (Lamborghini’s stated reason for using it in its top-shelf supercar) and can change gears in an amazingly instantaneous 50 milliseconds (above 6,000 rpm with the throttle opened more than 80 per cent), said shifting can be more than a little abrupt. Lamborghini calls this a “highly emotional shift feel” but I suspect that Bay Street dilettantes will complain about the extra mousse required if they hope to arrive perfectly coiffed.
Just a quick glance in the Aventador’s rear-view mirror is enough to dispel any worries that Lamborghinis have been homogenized by their association with Audi. Visibility out the rear window is, in a word, challenging.
Lamborghini, ever mindful of modern safety standards, has fitted a rear-view camera front and centre in the Audi-inspired centre console (Lamborghini’s infotainment system is almost a carbon copy of Audi’s MMI). Nonetheless, on numerous occasions, I resorted to the classic Countach trick of backing up with my butt hanging out on the door sill so I could be sure I wasn’t going to clip the (oh-so-expensive) rear fender on protruding brickwork or errantry curb a wheel on a sidewalk neither mirror nor camera could delineate. Silly, annoying, and most certainly retrograde, to be sure, but at least you know the boys back in Sant’Agata haven’t really mellowed much at all. Besides, it garners all manner of attention from the hoi-polloi and let’s not kid ourselves, one of the prime reasons, admitted or not, for Lamborghini ownership is the attention it draws.
And those shallow of ego will not be disappointed with Aventador ownership. Though my particular tester was liveried in a hardly spectacular white, friends, family, friends of family and even family of friends beat a path to my door. Neighbours I swear I didn’t know lived five doors down brought their kids over to ogle the Aventador’s comically sharp angles. A friend’s daughter drove all the way up from The Beach just to photograph herself behind the wheel. Hell, even my dear old dad, who usually loathes sports cars because they make him bend his creaky knees, begged me to bring it to Ottawa that he might lord it over his buds at the 19th hole. Aventador ownership is definitely not for the reclusive or hermit-like.
And, if somehow they have managed to ignore the Aventador’s visual attraction, their ambivalence would come to an abrupt end as soon as you press the little jet fighter-like red start motor button. The starter whirrs for a few seconds — as if the electric motor is gathering the momentum it knows it will need to fire that gargantuan 6.5-litre V-12 — and then all hell breaks loose.
Then, as soon as you gas it, the cacophony right behind your ears explodes into classic V-12. None of the V-10 blat that screams “almost” exotic, but a serious ripping silk, there’s-not-one-Audi-sourced-piston-roar that just keeps on getting more deafening the closer you get to its 8,500 redline.
And, if by some miracle, the Aventador hasn’t yet got your attention, accelerating with throttle pedal pinned and rev counter flailing surely will. At a screaming 8,250 revolutions per minute, there’s a whopping 700 horsepower trying to compress your horizon. Of late, we’ve been behind the wheel of all manner of supercars, up to and including the McLaren P1 that claims an almost obscene 903 ponies; 700 might be somehow mistaken as being lesser. That’s most certainly not the case.
Seven hundred horsepower, for instance, is enough to accelerate to 100 kilometres an hour in under three seconds, roughly the same as the aforementioned P1 (and Porsche’s almost-as-comically-endowed 918 as well). And, given its head, an Aventador will see the silly side of 350 kilometres an hour, a speed largely academic here in North America, but seemingly extremely important to some of the dilettantes — remember those shallow egos — that shop supercars.
Though still possessed of enough peccadillos to ward off all but the most dedicated of enthusiasts, there is absolutely no compromise to the Aventador’s performance. It is still very much a modernized Countach. All is right in the supercar world.
Though it displaced only 3.5 litres and boasted but 320 horsepower, a V-12 has powered Lamborghini’s top-flight super cars since the original 350 GT in 1964. Nor is that likely to change. While Ferrari is again starting to dabble in turbocharged engines — the upcoming California T — Lamborghini says “the only real choice for Lamborghini is a high-revving, naturally aspirated V-12.”
The company’s engineers profess that, while V-10s are fine up to 5.0 litres or so, for larger engines, “a lower number of cylinders would result in larger and heavier pistons and connecting rods, which would have a negative impact on the engine’s high-revving characteristics.”
Certainly, this latest L539 variant of the classic V-12 is no mere massaging of Audi technology. Indeed, everything about the 6.5L — right down to its fundamental bore and stroke — are pure Lamborghini.