Review: Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4 Roadster

If pleasure is spending 24 hours with a Lamborghini Aventador Roadster, then pain is handing back the key and trying to put the experience into words.

Piloting an Aventador is an intergalactic experience

The speed of it, the sound of it, the look of it, the longing looks at it: I’ve been up and down my big list of superlatives a dozen times, but there’s nothing in there that comes close to doing justice to the dizzying sensation of taking a spin in one of the most outrageous road cars ever built.

What to do? I could cross my fingers and hope that you’ll stare at the pictures of this Italian masterpiece for an hour before turning the page or calling your accountant without bothering to read this far. That way, I can fill the rest of the space with my favourite recipe for gnocchi, interspersed with a few choice quotes I picked up from the mouths of bystanders as I prowled around Edinburgh in the al fresco Lambo.

“Insane!”, “Ridiculous!”, “Keep your potatoes dry!”, “Epic!”, “Awesome!” and “It’s a… spaceship!”

But to shirk my duties would be to besmirch the Lamborghini’s raging bull badge and, wouldn’t you know it, that spaceship quip – blurted out by a blond-mopped tot tugging at his mother’s arm for a closer look – has hit the nail on the head. Piloting an Aventador is an intergalactic experience.

There’s that shape, for a start. The fabulous blend of sweeping lines, creases, louvred glass and air scoops ought not to belong on a road. Humming and hovering in the night sky above Area 51, yes, but not in broad daylight on a B-road near Bo’ness. Raise the scissor doors (a crowd-puller in their own right) and you’ll see the dramatic lines continue on the inside. The engine start button is covered by a flip-up switch, presumably pinched from the missile launch console of a Bond baddie’s lair.

The sound is otherworldly too – the Aventador’s high-revving 6.5-litre V12 crackles into life and screams all the way to the 8,500rpm red line, before breathing out with a series of howls and window-rattling explosions. In an open-topped car, the effect is sensational and, even if the weather’s not on your side and you have to keep the roof in place, you can lower a little window behind the seats so you don’t miss out on the fun.

The performance is certainly not of this planet. Top speed is 217mph – imagine that with the roof off. Four-wheel-drive and a snappy-shifting seven-speed paddle-shift gearbox offer warp factor acceleration. In the UK, the legal limit shouldn’t take much more than three and a half seconds to reach. Lamborghini’s people have done a fine job of directing air flow away from the cabin at motorway speeds, so conversations and unruffled hair are possible at a 70mph cruise.

Lamborghini has stiffened key parts of the car to make sure chopping the roof off doesn’t turn it into a blancmange. The extra engineering means the Roadster weighs 50kg more than its Coupe twin, but the upshot is nimble handling that’s easily a match for the fixed-roof car and a barely noticeable drop in performance.

So it’s no surprise that the Aventador sucks bystanders into its orbit – something we discovered when we parked a Roadster and a Coupe at the top of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. A sea of people, including the boy who thought he was spotting spaceships, clamoured for a closer look and a memory card’s-worth of photographs.

If actual aliens ever invade the Old Town, it’s unlikely they’ll cause as
big a stir as the day a couple of Scotsman 
Motoring lackeys in Lamborghinis brought the city-centre traffic to a standstill.

Lopping the roof off the Aventador makes it easier for tall drivers to get in and out, and the car is quite refined, even though a super-stiff carbon-fibre chassis and racing-car inspired suspension are built for sharp handling, not comfort.

Also, you might think in a roadster costing nearly a third of a million pounds, that the roof would glide out of sight at the touch of a kryptonite button, but no. Going topless in the Aventador means fiddling with a couple of levers to release two carbon-fibre roof panels, which then take up most of the boot space in the car’s nose.

No shopping trips on a sunny day, then. It’s a small price to pay for access to a world of expensive thrills.

VITAL STATS

PRICE £300,000

ENGINE 6.5l petrol, 12 cyl, 691bhp, 509 lb ft

PERFORMANCE Max speed 217mph; 0-62mph 3sec

ECONOMY 17.7mpg (Good luck)

CO2 EMISSIONS 370g/km