The Lamborghini Aventador Roadster is the most extraordinary car in the company’s illustrious history, or so said the firm's charismatic chairman, Stephan Winkelmann, at the car’s launch in Miami.
It’s a bold claim, given what’s been served up previously by the famous old supercar maker from Sant'Agata – the Miura SV and pretty much any version of the Countach are surely contenders.
Then again, one look at the mighty Aventador Roadster in the flesh tells you that it is indeed right up there with Lamborghini’s most outrageous creations. It looks like the sort of car Batman might drive on his day off, maybe when he’s holidaying on Miami Beach, although conceivably Bruce Wayne would prefer the Aventador SV Roadster instead with its swathes of black trim on the exterior.
Don’t for one moment think of the roadster as some kind of folly, however, or as a car that hasn’t somehow been engineered thoroughly for the job. Unlike the Murciélago Roadster, which was something of an afterthought to be honest, the open-top Aventador is a standalone model in its own right.
Its styling is unique, considerable care and attention having been employed to ensure it of a separate, more extrovert personality compared with the coupé. And beneath its reptilian-like skin, while it shares its basic carbonfibre tub platform, 6.5-litre V12 engine and seven-speed single-clutch gearbox with the coupé, dynamically it is perhaps more impressive than the fixed head, for reasons we’ll come to in a moment.
And like the coupé is available in fire-breathing Superveloce form which means the Aventador Roadster has 729bhp at its disposal rather than the equally ludicrous 680bhp that is bestowed on the standard Aventador.
Despite weighing some 50kg more than the coupé, Lamborghini claims the Roadster can set exactly the same time around the number one handling circuit at the Nardo test facility in the hands of all its test drivers.
Had the roof simply been removed and various areas of the car not been redesigned to accommodate the one quarter decrease in stiffness, there is no way the Roadster could achieve such basic speed across the ground.
On the road that’s exactly how it feels: pure, fast and sharp, and perhaps even a touch more precise than the coupé at the front end thanks to the fitment of bigger diameter tyres (optional 21-inch 355/25s at the back with 20-inch 255/35s at the front on the one we tested). These, say Lambo’s testers, make a small but key difference to front-end bite during the turn-in phase.
