Lamborghini’s 50th birthday present
to itself ? The Aventador Roadster. We drive the bunga-bunga party on wheels
Miami loves the Aventador Roadster. Forget
all that stuff about torsional rigidity, lap times, and 320kph+ top speeds.
This is the latest Lamborghini’s, any Lamborghini’s, natural habitat. Each road
is a four-lane catwalk, and it seems everybody is out to impress. The college
guys in their new be-striped Camaros might think they’ve got it; the dozen
dudes we see piloting 458s are sure they have. But nothing draws attention like
an ectoplasm green Lamborghini roadster strutting down the street.
The strut is more than justified. Not only
does the car look sensational, but after some torrid post-financial crash
years, compounded by the switchover from Murciélago to Aventador, Lamborghini
is back on track. In 2012, it delivered 922 of its flagship cars, and could
have shifted more had the small matter of an earthquake not shut the line down.
That’s double what the Murciélago sold in its best year, and Lamborghini has a
15-month order bank even now, two years from launch.
But
nothing draws attention like an ectoplasm green Lamborghini roadster strutting
down the street.
It’s not hard to see why when you consider
that the Aventador costs a quarter of the price being asked for other top-tier
supercars, like the Pagani Huayra, Koenigsegg Agera R and Bugatti Veyron. But
now it has spawned its own rival, the Aventador Roadster. And I’m struggling to
think of a reason why you’d buy the coupe instead. There’s likely to be an
outrageous price premium of course, but that’s unlikely to bother buyers at
this level. Choose the Roadster and you’re getting a car that does everything
the coupe does, and a whole load more.
Lamborghini’s sporadic ragtop heritage
stretches back to 1968 and an open-top Miura concept now in the hands of a
Swiss collector. The Countach was never a cab, but the Silhouette and Jalpa
were, and the Diablo sired a roadster version in 1995. Then came the Murciélago
and something went slightly awry. Instead of a removable Targa Top, the Murcié
Roadster ended up with one of those emergency shelters the Red Cross sends out
after a natural disaster. A collection of canvas sheet and different shaped
bits of metal tube, it was more difficult to fit than Cinderella’s shoe on an
ugly sister’s foot.
The new one is much better, if not quite as
slick as the electrically folding hardtops fitted to Ferrari 458 and McLaren
12C convertibles. To go naked, first fold the seatbacks forward, then flip the
catches behind them to release the two matt black-colored roof panels and slot
them into the front boot. Two panels, because that makes it possible to do the
job on your own. The panels themselves are made of a forged composite frame,
topped and tailed by RTM composite skins. The clever bit is that, once in
place, they actually improve the torsional rigidity of the carbon chassis, thus
negating one of the traditional whines often associated with convertibles, that
they’re not as stiff, and so not as much fun to drive as their hardtop cousins.
The
new one is much better, if not quite as slick as the electrically folding
hardtops fitted to Ferrari 458 and McLaren 12C convertibles.
Incredibly, Lambo’s R&D boss Maurizio
Reggiani claims the Roadster is as rigid as some of its rivals are in coupe
form. It’s barely any heavier than the coupe either, registering an extra 50kg
on the scales due to some additional strengthening in the sills, tunnel and
rear bulkhead. That additional ballast is the reason the Roadster hits 100kph
in a staggering 3.0sec, rather than the kidney-crushing 2.9sec of its hardtop
brother. They’re neck-and-neck for top speed too, both hitting 349kph. And
that’s regardless of whether you’ve got the Roadster’s roof in place. If you
actually managed to strap the old Murciélago’s tent to the space above your
head you were limited to a meager 160kph top end.
Not that you’ll get anywhere near even that
in stop/ start Miami traffic. The 6.5- liter V12 now has a brilliantly
integrated cylinder deactivation function that switches off an entire bank when
not needed. With the same 515kW as the coupe has on tap though, you could
probably send another five to sleep for cruising around South Beach, if you
could stand the N V H. Mounted north-south in the engine bay and 180 degrees
round from the mid-engine norm, the Roadster sends power to all four wheels via
a seven-speed sequential transmission. Not a dual-clutch ’box, but a
single-clutch unit unique to this car.
Not
that you’ll get anywhere near even that in stop/ start Miami traffic.
How you wish for that extra clutch and
shaft as you negotiate the dozens of stoplights on the fabulous Art Deco time
warp that is Collins Avenue and the adjacent Ocean Drive. In Strada, the sanest
of the Aventador’s three driving modes, the exhaust is hushed and shifts are
soft, but also slow. It’s like playing Commodore 64 games on a brand new
water-cooled gaming PC – improved, but still years behind the best. Lamborghini
claims the Aventador needs to have differentiation from the other V W Group
products, and that a single-clutch gearbox gives the emotive driving experience
a twin-clutch doesn’t deliver. In other words, it thumps enough for you to
notice. But that doesn’t compute, not when you can engineer in that emotion to
the later tech and still give the option of refinement.
Both
ends of the Aventador get racing-style pushrod suspension.
The ride feels tough too, and that’s
despite Lamborghini slightly softening the suspension after criticism of the
coupe’s ride at launch two years ago. Both ends of the Aventador get
racing-style pushrod suspension. Reggiani says it’s great for reducing
un-sprung mass and also gives vastly better control of suspension geometry. But
the dampers are passive which must inevitably mean making a compromise at the
development stage. How much low-speed and rough-road civility are you willing
to give up for ultimate handling precision and high-speed stability? Ferrari
and McLaren, even mother brand Audi, get round the problem with adaptive
dampers. The steering makes amends though. It actually feels slightly dead in
your hands after the Murciélago’s, but the response is incredible, the front wheels
responding to the tiniest of inputs with no sneeze-factor and, thankfully,
given Audi’s ownership, no annoying options for tweaking its weight.
