LAMBORGHINI’S CLIFFHANGER

Last summer, photographer Max Edleston and I almost dropped an Aventador SVJ Roadster off the side of the Raticosa Pass. It was a worldexclusive drive, where we collected the car – all £432,000 of it – from Sant’agata and kept it overnight Friday. The obvious thing to do was therefore to scope out the road that Lamborghini’s test drivers have used since the days of Bob Wallace and bag a set of mind-blowing images as the sun went down.

Despite an early rendezvous with the police, who had set up a roadblock consisting of two patrol cars, six officers and two machine guns in our honour on the outskirts of Bologna, it was going well. And then the Aventador went full prima donna and evaporated reverse gear at the worst moment imaginable.

It was while we were doing cornering shots, which involves lots of back and forth driving on the same road. Specifically, during the most perpendicular point of a three-point turn in a shallow, downhill-sloping gravel layby on the fresh-air side of the road. Reverse, selected via a button, just wouldn’t engage, even after we’d let the car cool and reset.

Having traipsed back uphill, Max adopted a prop-forward position and took the car’s weight while I released the brakes, then climbed out and joined him. With gravel slipping under our feet and P45s at the front of our minds, we established a faint rocking rhythm that grew and grew until we had inched this 1700kg mid-engined monster back onto the road.

Sweating profusely and with suspected hernias, we finished the shoot and stopped for a pizza in the quiet village of, well, I can’t remember. What I can recall is that the car’s hugely expensive carbon centre-caps were no longer in place by the time we’d paid the bill.