2017 Lamborghini Aventador review.

If you’re going to drive a new Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4, especially when clad in the optional vivid Arancia Argos paint, you should slap a couple of accident black spot roundels on its flanks.

As a thing to drive, the Aventador is as safe as anyone could reasonably expect a 690bhp supercar with sub-3.0sec 0-62mph capability to be, but as a device to distract other drivers from the road ahead, its powers may be unprecedented. You might never crash yourself, but you’re going to see plenty.

Aventador is laden with state-of-the-art technology, at its heart it remains a supercar of the old school, a massively wide, impossibly low machine powered by a outrageously powerful and classic normally aspirated V12 – words that would have applied no less accurately to the Countach at its first public showing more than 40 years ago.






Lamborghini also offers an Aventador Roadster variant, with a two-piece carbonfibre targa top weighing just 6kg that can be removed and stored in the Aventador’s nose. There is also a 729bhp Aventador S and the ludicrously quick and sharp 740bhp Superveloce, while Lamborghini have also created a couple of special edition versions including the Aventador Pirelli and the Miura Homage.

Lamborghini has taken the opportunity to sit down and draw up what appears to be the dream supercar specification.

But it wouldn’t be a Lamborghini without looks as distracting to motorists as an Eva Herzigova Wonderbra billboard. Design in-house by Lamborghini Centro Stile, its shape alone is all that some will need to be convinced it’s a good place to park a quarter of a million readies. It includes a deployable rear spoiler and also huge cooling vents that emerge from its flanks when the variably valve timed, quad-cam, 48-valve motor threatens to overheat.

The gearbox is a robotised seven-speed manual with, says Lamborghini, the quickest shift ever to be achieved from such a configuration. The company says it chose it over a dual-clutch automatic system like that now favoured by Ferrari because it is both lighter and more compact. There is no three-pedal option.

Power flows through the gearbox to all four corners of the car in a ratio governed by a central Haldex coupling. There’s an electronically controlled differential at the front and a mechanically locking item between the rear wheels.

In the finest traditions of great Italian V12s, the Aventador’s pulls from 1000rpm as if that was what it was born for, and then just keeps going on and on gently building in urge, sharpening its sound by degrees, reaching a shrieking crescendo just the other side of its 8250rpm power peak. Although an Aston Martin V12 has a more musical note, this is undoubtedly one of the finest V12s even to be bolted into the back of a supercar.

If only the gearbox were able even to approach this standard. Small and light it may be, but it’s bad enough to knock an entire star off the rating for this section. It can be driven in manual or automatic mode, in either Strada or Sport setting, leaving the most extreme Corsa program as a manual-only option.

In any setting, the car is horrid to park because it appears unable to creep, while the automatic function is slow and jerky. So manual is the only sensible choice. In Strada, the gearshifts are simply too ponderous, while in Corsa they are so savage that the jolt can physically hurt; what it is doing to its mounts can only be imagined.

So Sport manual is the only one of five configurations that works effectively. Call it up and remember to lift off the gas between shifts and the Aventador can be driven smoothly, but it requires concentration – rather defeating the labour-saving point of having a paddle shift in the first place.



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