Imperative groin thunder. I felt like an idiot. But I went with it.

Hands Down, 2nd place finishers not close. This was the best Car Review I have ever read. Full-stop.  A few selected choice excerpts:

Car and Driver called the roadster “the best Lamborghini ever.” The guys on BBC’s “Top Gear” didn’t just name the original Aventador the best supercar of 2011, they raced it down a runway against an F-16 fighter jet. (The car won.)

I’ve mostly owned rusted-out Jeeps and Volvos…But then (in an Aventador we) roared home along the roads of rural western New Jersey, where we live. At the tap of the gas pedal, the landscape turned into a smear. So this is what a 691-horsepower engine feels like.

I pulled the car into my daughter’s high school’s parking lot, and I half-accidentally revved the engine as I came into view. The resulting snort of sound made six dozen pairs of eyeballs swivel in our direction. The only way I can describe this blast is to borrow a phrase from the rock critic Lester Bangs: “imperative groin thunder.” I felt like an idiot. But I went with it.

The attention, sad to say, is mostly from men. High-performance sports cars are a bro thing. Men will scamper across six busy lanes of Interstate (as two did while I was pulled into an A & W burger stand) just to run over to pull at their crotches and ask you about the transmission. Women mostly wince as if they’ve caught a whiff of your Axe Body Spray.

And rappers have uttered some delicious lines about them. In his song “To the World,” Kanye West declares: “Pulled up in the A-V-entador / And the doors, raise up, like praise the Lord / Did the fashion show, and a tour, and a movie, and a score / This a ghetto opera, Francis Foreign Car Coppola.

On the way, how fast did we drive? (The car’s maximum speed is 217 m.p.h.) Faster than I am willing to admit. Fast enough, if only for short bursts and only when the highway was clear, that I could imagine either A) being Tasered by a state trooper or B) blasting off into low orbit over the Monongahela Valley.

Airliners take off at 140 to 180 m.p.h. It’s not a joke to suggest that this car, which does 200 m.p.h. without thinking hard about it, could get airborne.

The Aventador is an intuitive monster to drive. I got the hang of it almost immediately. It has paddle gear shifters on either side of the steering wheel. The all-wheel drive grips the road the way a lizard grips the side of a tree.

That engine is in the rear. A minuscule front luggage compartment has room for perhaps a squash racket, a laptop and a few bottles of Piper-Heidsieck. That’s about it. Your valet can follow in a separate car with the rest of your baggage. And with your children.

Most of the metaphors that blindingly fast cars call to mind are sexual. (All that torque and thrust.) I’ll save these for my therapist. But there’s a strong sense of tantric self-control when driving a high-performance car at poky legal speeds.  This kind of self-control is exhausting. I collapsed in hotel rooms at the end of each day’s drive. My neck muscles had also been clenched, I realized, from worrying about speed traps.

The Aventador will not help you get a date with a member of the Natural Resources Defense Council. It gets about 12 m.p.g. in combined city-highway driving. A 2013 survey found it to be the most fuel-inefficient car on the planet. The annual gas bill was estimated at more than $5,000.

The novelist Kingsley Amis once wrote that a surefire hangover cure is a short flight in an open-cockpit airplane. I suspect that a brief spin in the Aventador would accomplish the same thing.

I’d never own one, even if I could. But I miss it already.

Don’t miss the full article in the NY Times: What I Discovered on My Flash Drive

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