Lamborghini Aventador LP 780-4 Ultimae review: Out with a bang

The V12 engine in this Aventador Ultimae — the big Lambo’s swansong — bursts into life like a volcano. Oh, how I’ll miss that sound.

Massively exciting: the Lamborghini Aventador Ultimae

I look sometimes at people walking their big attack dogs and think, “What on Earth possessed you to buy that?” They could have had an Old English sheepdog, or a dalmatian or a labrador. But they thought, “No, what I want is a furry unexploded bomb that will, at some point, explode into a violent frenzy.”

When the Lamborghini Aventador arrived at my house last week, my gym instructor lady viewed it in much the same way I view attack dogs. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want something so fierce-looking and loud. And why on Earth would you want a car that can do 355km/h? I felt a bit like one of those men pleading with the police not to put Tyson the rottweiler down even though it’s got an actual human arm in its mouth. “Because it’s great,” I stammered.

I truly love the Aventador. Oh, sure, you can buy more economical, more comfortable and even faster supercars, but none delivers quite so much theatre as the big V12 Lambo. This is a car that should emerge, every morning, from behind a pair of massive theatre drapes in a cloud of dry ice while the full London Symphony Orchestra plays Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Through the Grateful Dead’s speaker stack.

‘Twas ever thus. Early Lambos such as the Miura, the Countach, the Diablo and the Murcielago were poster cars first and foremost. They were pantomime villains, and very difficult to handle. I first drove the Aventador in 2011 and was amazed: it had power steering, and all the knobs and screens were lifted straight from an Audi, so they made sense and did things you were expecting them to do.

I once drove an Aventador around Italy’s Nardo test track at over 300km/h and it was very bowel-loosening. But then I drove it all the way from the heel of Italy to Bologna and it was like a VW Golf. The steering was light; I could see what was coming at junctions and the aircon actually kept the inside cool. The next day I put in some fast laps at Imola and the brakes failed. This was all typical of a Lamborghini. They exist to be flamboyant, make a noise and then die. They’re like rock drummers. Or bees.

Sadly, people no longer want cars that are like bees. Boys now boast about how economical their dad’s car is, rather than how fast. My gym instructor’s views are now the mainstream and that means the Aventador has become a dinosaur.

To bid it farewell, Lamborghini has made this limited-edition version, the Ultimae. Fifteen were on a ship that caught fire and sank off the Azores in March but, happily, 575 aren’t at the bottom of the Atlantic and it was one of these that came to my house last week. God, it looked good. Low and mad and wide and fitted with the Matrix supergun exhausts and all sorts of aerodynamic knick-knacks.

What didn’t look quite so good was me trying to get inside. I had to put both my feet in the far corner of the footwell, then push my buttocks over the transmission tunnel before snapping my spine in half to get my head in. And, once there, I wished they’d sent a convertible because the headroom is extremely marginal.

Still, the engine bursts into life like a volcano. It’s the sound of yesterday and I’ll miss it. The 6.5-litre V12 unit, for this edition, has been tickled and teased to produce a whopping 574kW – and that colossal wallop arrives just shy of the 8000rpm red line. So to get the most out of it you must turn off all your senses and your hearing. Because 8000rpm in a Lambo is a loud and frightening place to be.

And then it’s time for the single- clutch, flappy paddle gearbox to work its magic, and this is not something it likes to do quickly. So there’s a pause, a hiatus in the terror. Like there is at the top of a rollercoaster. And then the gearbox finally does its thing and you’re back on the terror treadmill, scared that it might not stop and even more scared that it will. You hate it and you love it at the same time. Yes, the Aventador has carbon ceramic brakes and four-wheel drive and it’s nowhere near as heavy as you might imagine. But it’s still a massively exciting ride. Hard, heavy rock. Served up on a bed of lava.

And we won’t see its like again. Laws and public opinion mean the next big Lambo’s V12 engine will be sanitised with electrical assistance. It’ll be like a gallon of moonshine with a label saying “Drink responsibly”. Can you drink moonshine responsibly? I’m not sure you can. And that’s why I’m nervous about what Lamborghini does next.

Lamborghini Aventador LP 780-4 Ultimae

ENGINE: 6.5 litre V12 petrol (574kW/720Nm). Average fuel 18 litres per 100km TRANSMISSION: Seven-speed single-clutch automatic 4WD

PRICE: $1 million (estimated)

STARS: 4 out of 5