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. Continue reading “Imperative groin thunder. I felt like an idiot. But I went with it.”