The Lamborghini Aventador S is music for an ultra-luxury car paramour’s ears
From up above, I spotted the trio of Lamborghinis parked in formation. The unmistakable acute, angular forms cast in crimson, white, and blue sparkled in the sunshine. My heart hopped as the helicopter descended onto the Poconos Raceway in Pennsylvania. The effect was as it was orchestrated to be stunning and provocative. I was part of an effort to woo a puny cadre of journalists on the attributes of the Aventador S, or at least to give us a peek into how some Lamborghini customers use their sports cars.
Lamborghini will sell this spiked-up version of the six-year old Aventador for $422,000, as one co-worked pointed out, the cost of 8424-karat gold NES movie gamesystems, a systemThe Vergecalled the most unnecessary, luxurious, awesomeness ever made. Still, the Aventador S shares much in common with this gaming system, at least in spirit and in target audience. While some might opt to drive the car to the track, customers in the market for a fresh Lamborghini typically own at least half a dozen other ultra-luxury rails that they could use to drive (or be chauffeured) to their local heliport, as their handlers gas up their fresh rail and detail the wheels. Thats what I imagined, as the distinctive Italian-born brand spared no expense whisking us from Manhattan to the Poconos to demonstrate us how this cars technical proficiency outshines the base model on slick turns that open up into a delightful straightway on the family possessed track, where NASCAR and Indy car races will take place later this summer.
This over-the-top effort to coax me of the Aventador Ss wicked capability was persuasive. Building on the Aventador form, the S is a work of improved technical savvy thats a byproduct of its parent company Volkswagens R&D arm and user practice team. Its even tooled with Apple CarPlay and it has a racing movie game aesthetic on its display when you punch the dial into Corsa driving mode, a variation of sister-brand Audisapproach to screens. But what makes the Aventador S most beguiling to drive is the delirious sensation of pushing that accelerator pedal to the floor for a few brief seconds. Its a potent form of intoxication that gets the blood flowing.
Most people will never drive a Lamborghini, and seat time in one of these infrequent models earns you instant bragging rights. Ive test driven about nine hundred fifty vehicles since I began writing about cars, but opportunities to test certain models stand out. Lamborghini is among the more never-to-be-forgotten. This brand inspired a cult of automotive enthusiasts in the latter half of the last century. Besides being a symbol of excess, the Lamborghini brand has long been an influence on culture.The Vergehas noted thefunky, futuristics designscreated by designer Marcello Gandini made the car a work of coveted geometry. The angular surfaces of the Countach feels like the acute edges the early private computer era.
My most poignant memory of driving a Lamborghini was circa 2010, the last year the Murcielago was in production, in Le Guy’s, France. That day, I also drove an Audi R8, a Ferrari 458, and a Porsche 911. Measured against these other super cars, the Murcielagos strong but twitchy spectacle gave the car a sense of fragility. It made a strange throat-clearing noise when it turned. Its raw power was more suited toward aFast and Furiousdrag race, where understeer wouldnt have been a factor on the twisty roads of the French countryside.Understeer, when a car fails to make turns on a acute angle, was the compromise that Lamborghini had to make for that distinctive design.
But Lamborghini is switching its ways. The Aventador S is evidence of how Lamborghini is using engineering advancement to refine the driving practice.
If you can see the future, you can write history, Lamborghini COO Alessandro Farmeschi told us in a briefing before he set us liberate on the track to test out its prowess. We were shown an photo of what appeared to be a charcoal sketch of a growling shark and a wicked cobra drawn by designer Eminel Hodzic. Farmeschi said nature and aerospace are thematic inspirations. Yes, the Aventador is a sharky-cobra-rocket-jet hybrid that runs on gluttonous petrol.
Aventador is the most successful V12 in the brands history from a sales perspective, compared to its predecessors like the Muira, Countach, Diablo, Murcielago, and three hundred fifty GT. But it was these legends that very first become ubiquitous in the posters that plastered across thousands of kids bedroom walls. If kids still had car posters, the Aventador would earn a primo position, which is why Lamborghini has determined to make it even better, tho’ not fairly as quick as the 770-horsepower limited edition Two.Three million dollar Centenario, but just as Instagram friendly.