Desert storm: Dubai in an Aventador SV Roadster

There’s some sort of evil lurking in those exhausts. And I’m not just talking about the torturous scream when you wind the engine up past 6,000rpm, or the bloated resonance at lower revs that sounds like the devil himself showing his appreciation after a good meal. Hidden deep between the pyrotechnics and the snorts, I could swear the car is laughing at me – a malevolent chuckle from deep down in its boots.

Supercars don’t come any more intimidating than V12 Lamborghinis, or at least they shouldn’t, and this is a bull with extra balls – the Aventador LP750-4 SV Roadster. It’s the same trimmed-down, beefed-up recipe as the SV Coupe, but without a roof to guard you from the sensory bombardment. It will be louder and windier, that much we know, but is a posing-pouch convertible really worthy of a badge that’s been deployed just four times in the past 44 years, and reserved only for Lambo’s most hardcore offspring? I mean, even the Countach wasn’t deemed fit to join the SV club.

Photos: Malek Fayoumi

This feature originally appeared in the January 2016 issue of Top Gear magazine

Firstly, calling it soft is like referring to Ronda Rousey as a pansy – neither slur is advisable and both will earn you a bloodied nose. Like the Coupe, the 6.5-litre V12 has been augmented by 49bhp, taking the total to 740bhp at 8,400rpm and 507lb ft at 5,500rpm, while creature comforts are deleted by the fistful. There’s no navigation, no radio, bare carbon door panels with leather straps, carbon roof panels and carbon-shell bucket seats (more on those instruments of torture later). In fact, there’s carbon wherever you look and touch – from the wing to the fanged front intakes – contributing to a 50kg cut over the regular Aventador Roadster, although unavoidable chassis bolstering means it’s 50kg heavier than the SV Coupe.

Not that the performance figures are particularly bothered about the extra ballast – 0–62mph in 2.9 seconds is a tenth down, but the 217mph top speed is identical, and we’re told its ’Ring time is on a par with the Coupe’s astonishing sub-seven minute marker – just three seconds slower than a Porsche 918 Spyder. Yep, we’re in that sort of territory here. Suddenly, the £350,000 asking price is looking like a half-price sale

If it’s aggression you’re after, the Aventador is untouchable, even the F12tdf would retreat slowly if it were parked nearby. So extreme is the SV makeover that, on the Sheikh Zayed Road, traffic parts like a shoal of fish to usher us through – no flashing lights and beeping horns here, just respect. Wherever we stop, a swarm of selfie-crazed children descend and grown men just stand there, momentarily paralysed by lust – but that goes with the Lambo territory and always has. I’m not here to canvass opinion or soak up undeserved compliments, I’m here to drive, and drive I shall.   

We have 24 hours with the car (maybe a few more if we’re prepared to risk the wrath of Dubai’s Lamborghini dealer) and the entire United Arab Emirates to exercise it in. Jack Bauer would be pumped. The plan is to get far away from prying cameraphones and Dubai’s neon haze to a pair of lesser-known roads that are polar-opposite in character. This, we hope, will take the visual shock factor out of the equation and leave nowhere for the chassis and powertrain to hide. It will not be a stroll among the dunes, but a bootcamp in 40° heat – a round trip of foolish proportions that takes in a mountain squiggle in the north, a desert oasis in the south and hundreds of motorway miles in between

Unfortunately, what should be the most straightforward part of the process – collecting the car, fresh off the bomber from Italy – isn’t as swift as we had hoped. Courtesy of a seismically frustrating computer-says-no issue at Dubai airport, the car is held ransom at customs while we sweat it out for a day and a half. The feeling of relief when I have the key in my clammy hand, and eventually point the nose north, is trumped only by the unbridled excitement about where we’re heading. I think I’m about to blow a secret here – in fact, I know I am – because while you may have heard of Jabal Al Jais and Jebel Hafeet – two snaking, public-road hillclimbs crawling with every supercar owner in the UAE – there’s an even more spectacular mountain road in a place called Al Taween. Just a 90-minute drive from Dubai, it’s known only to a privileged few. Now to a privileged few thousand. Oops.

By the time we arrive, the blood-orange sun is sliding down the horizon at an alarming rate. There’s just time for an express handwash and to drag some enthusiastic kids out of the car by their ears so I can tackle one glorious ascent before night engulfs us. Although I’m oblivious to it at the time, the lower section is by far the best – a chain of wide, well-sighted sweepers that permits my first taste of what full throttle and flat upshifts in Corsa mode can do to the human body. Give it everything, and the response is instant – your head is jabbed back and pinned there as the shriek intensifies before you’re treated to a stiff kick between the shoulder blades on upshifts. If your hobbies include smashing your face into hard objects, you’re going to love this.

The surprising thing is the tyres feel so tacky and the chassis so unflappable that, despite the earth-moving forces at work, I’m quickly used to the harm my right foot can inflict, and asking for more at every opportunity. Right now, the only thing obstructing me from pushing harder is the gearbox. We’ve said it before, and I’ll happily reiterate it: it’s a shambles that a car so high-tech in so many areas (carbon-fibre monocoque, pushrod suspension, adaptive dampers, ceramic brakes, the list goes on) can be lumbered with a nodding-dog automated-manual transmission like this. 

Those vicious full-bore upshifts in Corsa mode are the only time when a gear slams home with the immediacy you expect, and, even then, the compromise is a boot in the back. Lambo calls it visceral, but we all know the Aventador should have had a twin-clutcher from the start. In Strada and Sport modes (that progressively dial down the dampers, throttle, exhaust, steering and transmission ferocity), changes are a slow, slurred process that interrupts the torque flow and can upset the whole balance of the car. But I’m nothing if not consistent and, having recently forgiven the Aston V12 Vantage S for the same issues because the rest of the package was so damn near perfect, I’m prepared to do the same here. The key is to stay in manual mode at all times, without exception, and drive around it with small lifts of the throttle as you change up. Not an ideal situation, but there’s satisfaction in perfecting your technique.

Now I’m in a rhythm, lunging down the straight bits and carving around the turns as the V12 howls at the brightening moon. I climb higher into the upper section of the road, going with the grain of the black and yellow arrows. Are they trying to warn me of some impending doom? The road tightens and narrows. All of a sudden it’s one hell of a test. Third and fourth gear bends have coiled into unfeasibly steep switchback first-gear hairpins – not at all what the SV was designed for, but a handy demo of the benefits of a variable-ratio steering rack nonetheless.

Easy-going it is not – the Lambo feels big and the waspish barriers close. The hulking great V12 has enough torque to punch out of these steep uphill corners, but it’s not at its best – it’s an engine that needs a head of steam before it starts freewheeling. Here, it’s like a Grand National winner confined to a petting zoo. We arrive at the summit – marked by a closed gate to an inauspicious-looking military facility – just in time to see the mountains swallow the sun. Error. Retracing our steps, this time with near-zero visibility and gravity adding its weight to the V12’s thrust, is a drive I won’t forget in a hurry, but there’s no time to dwell on near-death experiences. Today I’ve seen flashes of what this car is capable of, but I have an inkling that tomorrow’s location will be a better fit.

That stance endows it with racecar-like amounts of lateral grip, but push hard and you can get those beer-barrel tyres to slide with utter control and transparency. At one point, I crest a hill and hit a pile of sand causing the SV to kick sideways – the Arab version of aquaplaning – but rather than spitting me off at a tangent, it communicates clearly what’s happening and offers me the chance to correct my trajectory. If it were the Murciélago SV, I’d have been nose-first in a dune. 

As the sun kisses its apex I’m forced to adopt the local headwear, but, while I’m slowly melting, the car is getting better by the minute. Hot tyres and toasty ceramic discs are gripping and stopping so hard that however late I leave my braking, or early I jam open the throttle, I can do no wrong: I turn the wheel and it just sticks. Is there a torsional rigidity penalty compared with the Coupe? Probably, but you’d be hard pushed to notice it 99 per cent of the time. Hit a speed bump with too much gusto, and you sense the chassis tremble, but where it matters, in high-velocity corners, the front end goes precisely where you put it, and the steering weights up beautifully to the point where some muscle is required. Just as it should be, of course.

That there’s a chassis under its battledress not outshone by such a phenomenal engine is the real achievement here. I’d have one of the 500 SV Roadsters over the SV Coupe because, by removing a layer of insulation, it lets the merely visceral become violent – but then, I’m a glutton for punishment. Bottom line is we need to celebrate the SV and enjoy its absurdity while we can, because cars that burn fuel at this rate to glorious sonic and momentous effect are living on borrowed time. Not that the Aventador SV Roadster is fazed – I can still hear it cackling when I shut my eyes.