Lamborghini Aventador

Filippo Perini is reported to have drawn the Aventador in six weeks, and it shows in the best possible way: the shape has one idea and commits to it absolutely. Everything is a facet. There is barely a curved surface on the car, and the hexagon recurs as a motif at every scale, from the tail lights to the engine cover vents to the intakes. The proportion is deliberately extreme, the cabin pushed hard forward over a 2,700 mm wheelbase, the shoulders swelling behind the doors so the whole thing reads as an arrowhead from above. Scissor doors are non-negotiable on a V12 Lamborghini and they are here. The Roadster's answer to an open roof is two carbon panels weighing under six kilos each and stowed in the front compartment, rather than any kind of folding mechanism. Mitja Borkert's 2016 Aventador S revision is the change worth knowing: a larger splitter, new front ducts, a black finned diffuser and three single exhaust exits in place of the original's stacked pair, worth 130 percent more front downforce.

The Aventador never raced, and the reason is structural rather than accidental. Lamborghini's competition arm, Squadra Corse, built its entire programme around the V10: the Gallardo and then Huracán Super Trofeo one-make series, and the Huracán GT3, which took class wins at Daytona and Sebring in 2018 and 2019. There was no GT category the Aventador could have been homologated into without a purpose-built car, and Lamborghini never built one. What it built instead were track specials with nowhere to go. The Essenza SCV12 of 2020 is the clearest case: 40 cars, 830 PS, a carbon monocoque homologated to FIA prototype rules without any metal in it, and a one-make series invented for it because no existing series would have it. The SC18 and SC20 are Squadra Corse one-offs built for individual customers. The closest thing to a competition result anywhere on the Aventador's record is a lap time, 6:44.97 at the Nürburgring in July 2018, set by Marco Mapelli in a camouflaged SVJ prototype and taken off the Porsche 911 GT2 RS.

The Aventador is the supercar shape of the 2010s to people who have never seen one in traffic. A decade of driving games, music videos and phone wallpapers turned the wedge and the scissor doors into shorthand, and the production volume meant the shorthand was backed by cars actually on the road, which was never true of the Countach. Christopher Nolan continued a Lamborghini habit by giving Bruce Wayne a silver LP 700-4 in The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, three films into a run that had already used two Murciélagos. It turned up in Transformers: Age of Extinction two years later. The critical reception in 2011 was unusually warm for a Lamborghini. Car and Driver headlined its road test the best Lamborghini ever, Motor Trend called it the friendliest V12 supercar in the world, and Jeremy Clarkson rated it above the Ferrari 458 Italia, which Top Gear had previously called the best supercar ever made. Richard Hammond's only real objection was that it was no longer frightening enough.

Living with an Aventador is defined by the gearbox and cushioned by everything else. The ISR clutch is a wear item with a real replacement cost, $12,000 to $18,000 at a dealer, and how you drive decides whether that bill arrives at 25,000 miles or 10,000. Stop-start traffic is what kills it, which is unfortunate, because that is where a lot of these cars spend their lives. Internal transmission failures are rarer and considerably worse, running past $25,000 with weeks of downtime attached. Against that, the fundamentals are sound. The carbon monocoque does not corrode, flex or fatigue in any way an owner will ever meet. The V12 is naturally aspirated and understressed, with no turbochargers and none of the heat-soak problems that plague its rivals. Early cars, 2011 to 2013, ask for more transmission attention than later ones. The 2018 stall recall is a free software update and is close to universally done by now. Ground clearance is the daily irritation: the splitter is low, the nose lift is essential and the angles are unforgiving.