From the January 2012 issue of Car and Driver

Really, as a bull trotting into a Spanish fighting ring, the best you can hope for is to someday have a Lamborghini named in your honor. Because after the mules drag out your skewered carcass, your future is pretty much one of minute steaks and dog food.

The bull named Aventador, all 1118 pounds of him, put up a good fight in Zaragoza back on October 15, 1993. Matador Emilio Muñoz may have even broken a sweat because after he killed the animal—ideally done with an espada thrust down between the shoulder blades to sever the aorta—Muñoz was awarded one of the ears as a trophy. And people say hockey is a blood sport. But, alas, nobody has built a carbon-fiber supercar called the Gretzky.

Our 34-hour tryst with a $412,015 Lamborghini Aventador began at its factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese, proceeded to a test track near Milan where the critical acceleration and braking numbers proved to be 3.0 seconds and 144 feet, and ended with a series of redline rips through some deep tunnels in the Apennines near the Mediterranean coast. Spoiler alert: This review will be largely positive.

That's no fog lamp. The Lambo's exhaust glows red and spits the occasional flame because, of course it does. MARC URBANO

Murciélago—the bull, not the car—was blessed with a better fate than Aventador, surviving his 24 stab wounds in the ring and retiring with both ears to the Miura family farm, where he was presented 70 cows with which to mate.

The steel-tube frame Murci enjoyed a long life, too, aging into a respectably agile handler but suffering too many vestiges of the old days, including a crowded, offset pedal box, controls that were distant and not very usable or particularly attractive, and tungsten-hard seats. If you see a weaving Murciélago, the driver is either blotto, seized by lower back spasms, or attempting to operate a radio/navigation unit that was designed by a KGB cipher team. The Aventador is a clean sheet—100 percent new. The overall experience of living with it, however, is about 90 percent the same, yet there’s notable progress in that 10 percent.

Per the latest fashion in cars and airline tickets, Aventador pricing is a la carte. At the $393,695 base price, you can choose from just two exterior shades, black or yellow, with a black interior. If that is unsuitable, you may want to call in a decorator because you have eight factory body colors from which to choose (ranging from $1650 to $4100 extra), the option of any “out of range” color that you can think of (for $9100), plus four matte-finish colors (price: $14,000). There are four brake-caliper colors (black is standard; our gray ones are $1100), two wheel colors (silver is free; black is $1820), two rear coil-spring colors (black is standard; yellow is $1100), and one stand­ard and five optional interiors (priced from $840 to $3500) from which to pick.

MARC URBANO

At the factory, we begged for the orange car, but that one was “broken,” so we settled for the base gothic black, which makes the Aventador look like a stag beetle from the Horsehead Nebula. It’s tough to photograph a black Aventador and capture the voids and sinews and traces of its many acute and obtuse angles, but our guy managed. And it’s not as tough as driving an Aventador around Parma at lunchtime.

As in most Italian cities, the streets of the old city are as thin as 6 o’clock and lined by stone curbs that can do to a Lambor­ghini wheel what the bus loads of German retirees do to wheels of the local cheese. The Aventador is almost an inch wider than a Chevy Suburban, and its body is nearly seven feet longer than its wheelbase, which—jumbo wheels notwithstanding—leaves some galactic overhang.

You can avoid the worst chin-dragging incidents by learning quickly where the button lies for the front suspension jack (in the bank below the nav screen). It raises the nose 1.6 inches. Still, easing out of a blind alley onto a busy street means being preceded into the right-of-way by a couple yards of beak. Running errands in an Aventador is like going for tacos in the Blue Flame.

MARC URBANO

So many people will dismiss this car in all its decadent hugeness as just a badge of wankerism for old rich men in Viagra heat. Which is why it is so much more fun to test one in Italy. There, a passing Lambo evokes the sort of lump in the throat that the Brits get when a Spitfire victory-rolls overhead. This is ours. We made it. It is awesome.

Later, in tiny Pontremoli, an ancient town near Italy’s west coast, I was positioning the Aventador for a shot near a church when an elderly lady with gunmetal hair leaned into the open window—just leaned right in with her broad, Romanesque face—and said, “Siete molto, molto fortunato!” Well, everyone is lucky to be in Italy on a sunny day, even if your car gets 11 mpg and costs $149 to fill. But perhaps a one-eared bovine spirit was indeed watching over us because in more than 500 miles, we managed not to chew a wheel, get arrested, or cause an international incident by scything down a native.

The Aventador is constructed mainly of carbon fiber, though you wouldn’t know it by the curb weight (4085 pounds) or the fact that the magic weave is entirely hidden behind paint, leather, and trim. No doubt, future special editions will weigh less and be stripped naked—for a fee. Meanwhile, the Aventador’s cabin is easier to get into and out of than the Murci’s, through doors that swing up and slightly out and by crossing a narrower and lower sill. And it offers two somewhat spongier bucket seats with which, over time, your back develops an acceptable détente. Heated power seats are $4200. Our car didn’t have them.

The new sloping center console is studded with helpful controls, including the button for selecting reverse and the start button, hiding under its red, flip-up-for–World War III safety cover. Yes, much of this is the same Audi MMI navigation/stereo/climate gear found in an A6, thinly disguised by a psychedelic hexagonal motif. But it all works, and there’s something to be said for that in a car offering plenty of other distractions.

In that same small-diameter vein of practicality, there’s plenty of room for feet this time. Granted, there’s no clutch pedal offered in this car, so that helps. And the controls and gauges are all pulled in closer to the driver than before, making it feel more like a vehicle and less like a hot tub with a steering wheel. One of the best parts: The shoulder belt hangs—for once—just inches from your shoulder and within easy grasp. Clearly, “ergonomics” is no longer a four-syllable word with no Italian translation.

Well, the two shallow interior bins and the single front luggage compartment are still hilariously small, honoring one tradition in artisanal cars. You do what mid-engine Lambo owners have done since Countach days: Pack only a credit card and buy clothes at your destination.

Lambo resisted painting the windows and seats black. The red start-button cover ensures that you'll pick up on the fighter-jet theme. MARC URBANO

After a lunch of prosciutto di Parma, we beat it up the autostrada for Milan and the test track at Vairano. Everybody imagines that supercars sound like Valhalla’s pipe organ all the time. Not so. At a steady 80 mph, the Bugatti Veyron sounds like a Carolina textile mill inside. The Aventador is better isolated from tedious noise, and the 6.5-liter V-12 sounds saucier, its intake and exhaust snarl cutting through the stale drone of tires, belts, pumps, gears, and injectors, even when it’s just lazing along at 3000 rpm in seventh gear.

The single-clutch tranny is new, with independently moving shift forks for quicker changes and three driver-selectable settings: strada (“road,” in manual or automatic mode), sport (manual or automatic), and corsa (“track,” which is manual only). It is definitely prompt, but compared with newer dual-clutch boxes in the Ferrari 458 and others, it still feels dated, especially around town when yawning torque holes between shifts cause passengers to bob and sway in their seats. Once in a while, in low-speed situations, the clutch bounces between slip and grip like a nervous first-time stick shifter.

You can dial up the shift aggressiveness by selecting “sport” or “corsa,” but that also increases the shock (and awe). In launch-control mode, the clutch shows no mercy, banging closed like you’ve been rear-ended by the Rock Island Line. Teamed with computers managing power to the four wheels, the 691-hp V-12 produces a 10.9-second quarter-mile at 133 mph while rattling candlesticks in the Vatican.

MARC URBANO

The standard carbon-ceramic discs yielded six stops all short of 150 feet. That kind of rapid kinetic-energy conversion evokes the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. The only unsatisfactory result was the 0.95-g skidpad performance. Undoubtedly, there is more grip, but the only suitable spot to test it at Vairano is a dusty lot that is crowned down the middle for drainage.

Do not bore us by pointing out in letters that Porsche’s 911 Turbo is lighter, quicker, and considerably cheaper. Nobody, and especially not the valets at the Hotel de Paris, cares. Both the Ferrari 599 and Lexus LFA are also lighter and (slightly) cheaper, and both are considerably slower. Not that any valet cares about that, either. It is sufficient for us that the Aventador is the fastest stock Lamborghini we’ve ever tested and that an Aventador is the loudest fashion scream on wheels—at least, for less than half a million.

Over the slithering asphalt eel of the Passo della Cisa down to the coast, the Aventador dropped its last card. The steering is definitely better; it’s more reactive, less chilly to the touch, and less like pushing on string while barreling into what rally navigators might call a “three-right-tightens.” It’s hard to declare that the cornering grip or body control is hugely improved. It feels so, but the Murciélago was very good at the end and much less susceptible to the bawling understeer that dogged it most of its life.

Our Aventador absorbs all available light. MARC URBANO

If you have the Aventador’s stability control set to “corsa” (or, indeed, turned off) and are an Apache with the throttle, it’ll reward with a sturdy push from the back to rotate you toward the path of righteousness. It can thus achieve truly terrifying speeds without feeling stressed . . . and truly terrifying noises. The 8500-rpm redline and furious spin-up of torque, especially from 5000 on when the ears flatten against the deep percussive energy emanating from the back, remind you of why the major Italian boutiques eschew turbos. With so many moving pieces coexisting in such balanced harmony, no machine of conveyance is as melodramatic as a short-stroke Italian V-12.

Ferrari figured out long ago that it’s not just about speed. With Audi’s money, Lambo has finally learned how the other guys pull the driver more fully into the experi­ence. The Aventador is pretty much what the old car was: enormous, loud, stupidly impractical, and obscenely flamboyant. It’s also ­better at being so, but we’re not here to ­persuade you. Those of you who want it and can afford it already know who you are.

MARC URBANO

MARC URBANO

Color abounds in the Lambo’s digitally rendered cluster, which has fuel and temperature readouts fanning out from the cycloptic tach. The tach can be toggled to show a rather crowded 370-km/h (230-mph) speedometer instead, and it highlights the selected gear by supersizing one of the seven digits. It’s all logical and legible, but it will not win over anyone who has an aversion to PlayStation dashboards. Ferrari does it classier by pairing an old-school analog tach with digital info screens, and the all-digital Lexus LFA shows more inspiration with its organically animate displays.

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