Lamborghini Murciélago

Luc Donckerwolke had a difficult job: follow the Countach and the Diablo without copying either, and do it under new German owners. What he drew is the flattest and most rigorously geometric Lamborghini of them all, a single wedge with almost no decoration, its roofline barely a metre and a bit off the ground. The theatre is functional. The shoulder intakes rise on electric motors when the engine wants air, the rear wing lifts in stages, and both sit flush the rest of the time, so the car looks calm parked and hostile at speed. Scissor doors carry over from the Countach, as they have on every V12 flagship since. For the 2004 Roadster, Donckerwolke cited the B-2 stealth bomber, the Wally 118 WallyPower yacht and Calatrava's Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències in Valencia for the reworked buttresses and engine cover, and it is a rare case where a designer's references are visible in the result. Filippo Perini's 2006 LP 640 facelift added asymmetric side intakes, the left one feeding an oil cooler, and a single exhaust outlet through the diffuser.

Lamborghini still would not go racing, so somebody else did it for them. Reiter Engineering, with Audi's backing, turned the Murciélago into the R-GT: the V12 cut to six litres and restricted, all-wheel drive thrown away for rear drive, carbon bodywork, 1,100 kg. It was shown at Frankfurt in 2003 and offered to customer teams at €500,000. Rinaldo Capello and Tom Kristensen qualified the first one at Monza that autumn and did not start. Oliver Gavin and Peter Kox took third on the car's actual debut at Valencia in 2004, and then it spent two seasons breaking. The revised 2007 car finally delivered: Christophe Bouchut and Stefan Mücke won the FIA GT season opener at Zhuhai outright, the R-GT's only victory. Le Mans was crueller. JLOC finished unclassified in 2006 after failing to complete the final lap, and IPB Spartak came home in 2008 exactly one lap short of being classified. Real results did come elsewhere, including fifth in class at the 2008 Spa 24 Hours and the GT1 title in the first Asian Le Mans Series in 2009. The separate RG-1, built for JLOC, won the GT300 class at Suzuka in March 2006.

Murciélago means bat, which is the kind of coincidence a film studio does not waste. Christopher Nolan put a Murciélago Roadster under Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins in 2005 and an LP 640 in The Dark Knight three years later, where the car is deliberately wrecked to save a life. Lamborghini lent the production three LP 640s for that sequence and got two of them back. That is the Murciélago's cultural high-water mark, and it is a good one, because it fixed the car in the public mind as what a billionaire drives when he wants to look frivolous. Beyond the cinema it did the ordinary supercar work: every driving game of the decade, every bedroom wall, every schoolboy argument about pronunciation. The car also carries one unglamorous record. The EPA rated the manual LP 640 at 8 mpg in town and 13 on the highway, making it the least efficient car on sale in the United States in 2008, a fact the internet has never allowed it to live down.

The Murciélago is the first Lamborghini you can own without a support vehicle, and owners are generally cheerful about it. The V12 is understressed and durable, the structure does not rot, and the electrics do what Audi's sign-off demanded of them. What costs money is the clutch, and on an e-gear car it costs money often. The engine has to come out, so the labour dwarfs the part. Early e-gear software was harsh, particularly pulling away on a hill, and shift quality improved measurably with the 2009 update. The hydraulic actuator can fail internally and simply refuse to select a gear, which is the expensive version of the same problem. Everything else is short and mostly cheap: a brake switch that reports a pedal press that never happened and freezes the gearbox, occasional valve-timing faults that show up as a misfire, and oil consumption around a litre per 1,000 miles that alarms new owners and worries nobody who has run one. Tyres, brakes and fuel are exactly as expensive as the car looks.