The interior certainly sets the right tone. Huge swathes of the letterbox cabin are trimmed in Alcantara, which gives it a tactile fleeciness that makes a pleasing if somewhat superficially soft epidermis for the bony lightweight carbon fibre tub in which you’re sitting. While the instrument cluster is dominated by a liquid crystal display showing all the key instruments in Lambo yellow.
The new SV-branded bucket seats and flat-bottomed steering wheel look great and play their part in an eccentric, pared-down cabin of utter splendour, from the machined, screwed-down, gorgeous austerity of the floormats to the lacquered carbonfibre skins of the scissor doors.
The V12’s ignition button is still nestled under a red safety catch, and although its starter has the charismatic noisy whine, the engine’s idle tends to get lost beneath the maelstrom of radiator fans that kick in to variously chill the SV’s components.
The car gets underway graciously, though, and the hydraulic nose-raiser is so quick that you can operate it between speed humps. Its fitment is a fitting reminder that while Surrey’s busy roads don’t necessarily show a supercar at its best, they are nevertheless the sort of place that many will spend their lives.
As the Porsche 911 GT3 RS and McLaren 675 LT proved, this ought not be any impediment to their enjoyment. Both of the SV’s rivals managed to be acutely involving away from a track, such was their marshalling of their respective talent.
It was precisely this ability to conjure vivid sensation at sane speeds that was missing from the standard Aventador. Its general clumsiness made it easy to mash the V12 into hyper-frenzy, then call time at a corner because the car was as feelsome as a brick-wheeled rocket sledge.
Over the same ground, the SV is dramatically improved. In fact, it’s nigh-on phenomenal. For a start, and despite the appearance of those huge alloys and its sibling’s reputation, it rides with unanticipated élan.
Where the standard car fumbled and thumped at the asphalt like an amateur panhandler, the lighter SV sieves it through its new dampers with genuine dexterity; filtering out the nastier intrusions so that, at speed, just enough patter resonates in your nether regions for an informative reading of the road. The ride is tensioned up like a guy-wire, but gratifying with it.
The chassis functions best in mid-intensity Sport mode, which is doubly marvellous because that’s the mode in which you’ll want the V12 almost permanently situated. Leave it in Strada and you’ll need a built-up shoe to get the good stuff, so dialled back is the first half of the throttle response. In Sport, the long-travel pedal goes from emulsion roller to watercolor brush.
Macromolecular increments produce different accelerative effects, maturing from hot hatch to sports car to hypercar within an Achilles tendon-worth of travel. It is easily delicate enough - and the higher gears long enough - for you to macerate your licence in a single ratio simply by half-hustling the V12 through its range of impressions.
Flat in second and third - all the public highway and sanity can bear - it’s dazzling; striding past most fast-car adjectives to the silliest end of the scale. Neck-snapping. Expletive-fuelled. Mind-bending. Only the gearbox keeps its high-rev pyrotechnics earthbound. Infuriating before, its overhaul upgrades the transmission to tolerable.
