The Lamborghini Aventador Roadster is the most extraordinary car in the company’s illustrious history, or so said the firm's charismatic chairman, Stephan Winkelmann, at the car’s launch in Miami.
It’s a bold claim, given what’s been served up previously by the famous old supercar maker from Sant'Agata – the Miura SV and pretty much any version of the Countach are surely contenders.
Then again, one look at the mighty Aventador Roadster in the flesh tells you that it is indeed right up there with Lamborghini’s most outrageous creations. It looks like the sort of car Batman might drive on his day off, maybe when he’s holidaying on Miami Beach, although conceivably Bruce Wayne would prefer the Aventador SV Roadster instead with its swathes of black trim on the exterior.
Don’t for one moment think of the roadster as some kind of folly, however, or as a car that hasn’t somehow been engineered thoroughly for the job. Unlike the Murciélago Roadster, which was something of an afterthought to be honest, the open-top Aventador is a standalone model in its own right.
Its styling is unique, considerable care and attention having been employed to ensure it of a separate, more extrovert personality compared with the coupé. And beneath its reptilian-like skin, while it shares its basic carbonfibre tub platform, 6.5-litre V12 engine and seven-speed single-clutch gearbox with the coupé, dynamically it is perhaps more impressive than the fixed head, for reasons we’ll come to in a moment.
