I daily drove a £440k Lamborghini Aventador SVJ, and it's not the car you think it is

It’s properly nuts finding a bright green, Italian-registered Aventador filling your driveway each morning, but even that’s nothing compared to finding it being reversed onto your driveway in a snowstorm. I’d been out for a play in my winter tyre-shod Golf and was in my kitchen making a brew when I heard the unmistakable drawl of the Aventador’s V12. ‘It can’t be,’ I said to myself, thinking about how few cars I’d seen out there but, yes, it was Dickie, keeping our appointment to swap cars. 

I was chatting over the fence with my neighbour and he was grinning and shaking his head at the figures – 759bhp, 218mph, £440k… ‘Would I be able to even drive something like this if I ever got the chance?’ he asked. Good question.

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The answer is yes. If you could get used to the alien environment – the width and the lack of visibility compared to a regular car – then there’s no reason why not. What makes it possible are power steering, automated gearboxes, and traction and stability control, which make current supercars accessible and exploitable by all of us. Way back in 1990 I had the Aventador’s great grandad on test for a Performance Car cover story: ‘Three days with the Diablo’. It demanded so much effort with manual steering and a super-stiff clutch pedal, and care given that traction control was down to you. If you wanted to enjoy the thrills of that 485bhp, 5.7-litre V12 you had to put the effort in.

I thought of the contrast when I took the SVJ out after the snow had melted. There’s so little physical effort required that you genuinely could use it every day. Boot it from a standing start and if there’s not enough grip, stability control will save you from mishap. Probably the biggest risk, as I told my neighbour, is arriving too fast at a corner.

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To that list of what makes today’s supercars easy to handle you can add immense anti-lock brakes and advances in tyre technology. I was staggered at how much grip the Pirelli P Zero Corsas had when it was wet and close to freezing. The Corsa is not just a summer tyre, it’s a tyre for a summer trackday, with light tread and a compound that needs heat to work at its best (and at least 8deg C to function properly). It shouldn’t work in snow and you’d forgive the Aventador for feeling a bit treacherous on cold, slick asphalt, except that it doesn’t. There was barely a flicker from the stability control light.

I wasn’t brave enough to turn off traction and stability control but why would you? This is not a car you hustle into corners; there’s too much mass behind you and not enough room if the broad tail gets moving. Just get it locked onto the line before squeezing the throttle as much as you dare, because that’s what we are all here for: that huge, loud, monster of an engine is still the star of the Lamborghini show.

This story first featured in evo issue 286.

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