During a lunch break from childhood labors clicking stopwatches at a Vintage Auto Racing Association event held at Ontario Motor Speedway, I had my first up-close walk-around of a Lamborghini Miura, the definitive Northern Italian mid-engine exotic. Earlier I’d fallen in love with a Lancia Aurelia spyder that was circulating the track, and later that day a Ford GT MK IV big-block V8 thundered down the long straights, reverberations transforming me into a human tuning fork. Lectures on the disadvantages of complexity, which had merit 45 years ago, could not break the spell of Miura’s seductive form, the stuff of teenage fever dreams.
With a high-tensile German thread tugged through the rich brocade that is Lamborghini, Aventador S Roadster is fulfillment of Ferruccio Lamborghini’s ambitions of more than a half-century ago, a conclusion I drew about six weeks ago after a long weekend with an Aventador S Coupe.
Aventador S Roadster is a tough and outrageous Super GT for the hedonistic life of a suddenly successful man, a car that provokes powerful emotions yet is reliable and obedient, a dream that does not fail. To own this car, to positively embody the blend of social imagery and sheer real-world performance requires a durable, robust ego that says, “I expect to win.”
Aventador S Roadster debuted at the Frankfurt show last fall, and first examples are arriving in the U.S. this week. After a quick refresher drive last week through the Santa Monica Mountains in the silver Roadster seen here, reacquainting myself with the 6.5-liter V12, I can argue that the Roadster is among the best cars on the planet for a “Sideways” weekend tour of our central coast wine country, perhaps on the way to August’s Monterey Car Week, where the Roadster would star at that populist madhouse event, Exotics on Cannery Row. There is no greater embodiment of the Omar Khayyam philosophy than an exotic open car rushing along two-lanes through fields of grape stakes.
Top down, the Roadster solves one of the Aventador Coupe’s ergonomic challenges. Scissor open the door and step in using a formula car technique, bracing hands to each side and gently lowering hips into the quilted leather bucket. A graceful, elegant motion that also ensures personal dignity when everyone is staring at the car parked at Andrew Murray in Santa Barbara, or Opolo or Silver Horse in Paso. To achieve perfection, perform dips in your workout several times a week.
To a supercar neophyte the dash panel might seem overwhelming, like an airplane panel lined with padded leather, switches commanding functions not performed by conventional cars. Given enough stick time, the gauges, controls and switches all prove logical. There’s a reason the front-end lift button is high on the center stack not far from the steering wheel rim—that splitter on Roadster’s chin needs a couple inches clearance entering a bumpy drive.
Big and chunky, the steering wheel offers considerable range of adjustment, the steering column a gift of the VW Group’s depthless engineering. Paddles are big, allowing placement of hands in classic 10-and-2 up high or shuffle steering along the bottom of the rim below the 9-and-3 position. As in the Coupe, taller people should special order a low-mounted driver’s chair, to lower hips a couple inches for ideal vision out that steep windshield. Hence, Lamborghini’s Ad Personam services.
Ideally, an owner should appreciate the technology and not just the social impact. It’s anything but a parade float for showing off. Roadster wins many friends, and guiding people through an inspection of the systems and technologies and manifestations of fine art brings joy. Every component is wrought to perfection, a presentation piece. Open the rear deck to see the polished cylinder of the dry sump, suitable to hold lilies on a sideboard like a kinky vase bought at Geary’s. Located a hand’s breadth from the massively proportioned magneto-rheological dampers that lay nearly horizontal just under broad, thin wafer of the rear deck, the dry sump is one of many components to point out, knowing grin on your face. The carbon-fiber X-brace, the engine badge, the crackle finish on the airboxes and their big air intakes, the flying saucer ceramic disc brakes, the quality of the paintwork, they all add to the storyline.
Physical presence aside, the V12 stars in a Lamborghini. In S Coupe, I was drunk with the power and response of the V12, measuring just shy of 400 cubic inches, a classic muscle car dimension. Yet it gathers and sheds revs like a superbike motor—RAP RAP RAP. To hear Aventador’s shriek with the top down beats any pharma on the planet.
And here again, that German thread, the subtle integration of known VW Group technologies like the flatscreen gauges, tach needle jumping, and the little black boxes that guarantee a flawless 900-rpm idle even after a hard run. Pound the car without mercy, no remorse, no hesitation. This magnificent engine seems unburstable.
When I visited Lamborghini for the original Diablo launch hosted by il Drago, 3-time world rally champion Sandro Munari, who was the PR man at the time, the old buildings remained little more than an Italian hot rod shop. Charming, but people expect mechanical, electronic and aesthetic perfection for a half-million bucks in the 21st Century. Lamborghini today has sophisticated assembly processes, like a satellite facility. One must only inspect the door hinges, door jambs, any attachment point for struts or suspension, panel fit, precision of mechanical and structural pieces to see the difference—all micro-meter perfect, flawless, not the batch-built hammered-together pieces of Lamborghini’s “heritage” cars of the 1960s and ‘70s. The old cars are gorgeous, but after an old friend considered buying an early Lamborghini Urraco to build as a Goodwood car, expecting its tiny V8 would produce wonderful music, he backed away, concluding that each car had too many variations, typical of low-volume sports cars built into the 1970s. Not acceptable today. Poke your head into the footwells of Aventador S, pull forward the big chairs to inspect HOW all the interior pieces fit together—rattles and loose bits will not manifest here. Tight as a drum.
Either when ordering or taking delivery, make the flight and visit the works. Ask for a cappuccino with one of the current Three Amigos who run the place. Or, if he can make the time, request coffee and biscotti with Aventador’s designer, Filippo Perini, who now heads up Italdesign. Filippo is one of the most urbane and passionately knowledgeable gentlemen in the design business. Equally engaging is his successor, Mitja Borkert, who was born on the edge of nowhere in a country that no longer exists, East Germany. Yet his wild talent and energy for life conjure thoughts of cars yet to come. There’s an energy at Lamborghini that has not yet fully translated to greater public understanding of the firm’s depth of engineering capability, of what the cars really are.
Ferruccio Lamborghini was a farm boy who made his first fortune with tractors and second with home air-conditioning systems that dominated the Italian market. He wanted to create an Italian Super GT that was tough as nails like his tractors, but with 1960s automotive engineering and the Italian labor force of the time, he never fully achieved that goal. He sold out and retired to his vineyards, becoming a winemaker.
Looking down from his labors in the Vineyards of Heaven, Ferruccio Lamborghini will no doubt be pleased when he sees a man and woman in an Aventador S Roadster arcing through wine country, that limitless V12 splitting the air.
