Lamborghini Centenario

Filippo Perini drew the coupé and Mitja Borkert the roadster, at the point where Centro Stile was transitioning between the two, and the car reads as a bridge between the Aventador's language and the sharper one Lamborghini adopted afterwards. Most of the forty cars wear visible carbon rather than paint across the body, which sets the surfacing off in a way colour cannot: the Y-shaped light signatures, the hexagonal motifs, the deep side intakes and the aggressive front splitter all read as structure. The tail is the most distinctive part, with an exposed engine bay, a large diffuser and the three exhaust outlets exiting high and centrally, the first Lamborghini to arrange them that way. Inside, the change is bigger than it looks: the Centenario introduced the 10.1-inch portrait touchscreen that records telemetry and brought Apple CarPlay to the marque for the first time, which sounds mundane until you remember what the switchgear in a Murciélago felt like. It is the first Lamborghini few-off whose interior belongs to the present century rather than to a race car.

The Centenario never raced, and unusually for this family the reason is that it was pointed somewhere else entirely. Lamborghini's competition activity in 2016 ran through Squadra Corse with the V10 cars, the Huracán Super Trofeo one-make series and the Huracán GT3, which was winning in international GT racing at the time. The V12 flagship had no factory programme, and a forty-car run has no class to enter. What the Centenario did instead was development work. Rear-wheel steering appeared on this car first and went into the Aventador S within months, and the chassis electronics that manage it became part of Lamborghini's standard toolkit, eventually reaching the cars Squadra Corse does race. That is a more useful contribution than a class win in a GT4 field would have been. If you want the competition connection for this engine, it belongs further back, to the Murciélago R-GT of the mid-2000s, and further forward, to the hybrid prototypes Lamborghini took racing at the end of the following decade.

The Centenario reached more people than any other car in this family and it did it through a games console. It was announced as the cover car of Forza Horizon 3 in 2016, shown at E3 in Los Angeles alongside the game, and went on to appear on the box art and in the hands of millions of players, which is a scale of exposure forty physical cars could never generate. That timing was not accidental: Geneva in March, E3 in June, the game in September, and a car that had already sold out to forty people who would rarely drive it in public. Beyond that its life has been the usual one for scarce modern Lamborghinis, split between private collections, occasional concours appearances and a small number of auction catalogues. The name has done quiet cultural work too, because it puts Ferruccio's own centenary in front of an audience that mostly knows the brand through the badge rather than the man. For a company that spent decades selling posters, selling box art was the logical next step.

Underneath the carbon, this is an Aventador of the SV era, and that is genuinely good news for an owner. The V12 and the seven-speed ISR gearbox have been in production since 2011, the dealer network and independent specialists know both, and nothing about the powertrain is experimental. The single-clutch ISR is the item that defines the ownership experience: crisp when driven hard, hesitant and shuddery at crawling speed, and expensive when the clutch reaches the end of its life, which arrives sooner on cars used mostly in town. Lamborghini also issued a recall covering Aventadors built between 2011 and 2017 for engine-control software that could downshift and stall the V12, so confirming that update is worthwhile. The rear-wheel steering is the one system with no long history behind it, and while there is no pattern of failures, it is worth having exercised and inspected by somebody who has seen one. Bodywork is the expensive unknown: exposed structural carbon across most of the body means cosmetic damage is a specialist repair rather than a respray.