Lamborghini Aventador S: Performance and Intensity Dialled Up to 11

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - For everyday driving, there is one switch on the dashboard (second from left) that you will activate most often. It’s called the hydraulic front-end lift, and raises the front end of the car by 40 millimetres to prevent scraping when accessing a driveway or crossing speed bumps.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - The cabin is cramped, owing to an impossibly low roofline and the width of the centre console. The interior design of the Aventador S is not quite as wild as its body, but it boldly states that this is a flamboyant Italian car.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - The 6.5-litre, naturally aspirated V12 engine in all its glory.

Lamborghini Aventador S - Gabriel Gélinas getting ready to get on the track.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - The Aventador S is equipped with a rear-wheel steering system that turns the rear wheels in the opposite direction of the front wheels by up to 3.0 degrees when the car is driven at low speeds to improve manoeuvrability, and turns them in the same direction as the fronts up to 1.5 degrees to ensure better handling in quick lateral transitions and fast corners.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - Lamborghini’s Aventador S is a beast of a car. It is brutishly fast, sings with a bold expansive voice like Pavarotti in his heyday, and every inch of its body looks like it means business.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - The naturally aspirated 6.5-litre V12 engine is very analog in nature. A lot of today’s performance cars are powered by turbocharged engines that deliver torque across a wide plateau, making them very tractable, but the big Lambo is keeping the faith with lots of displacement and an 8500-rpm redline, which is a lot of revs for a V12 engine.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - The one glaring weak link of the Aventador S is its single-clutch paddleshift gearbox. Even when driven at speed on the track, this gearbox is slow to shift and the car’s balance can upset by the sudden surge of power that occurs after an upshift. Compared to the seamless power delivery of today’s dual-clutch gearboxes, the Aventador’s transmission is pure analog.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - This four-wheel steering system allows the Aventador S to respond with immediacy to initial turn-in and reduces the understeer that is typical of all-wheel-drive performance cars.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - At full song, this engine just wails owing to a short high-flow exhaust system. Whenever you open the throttle, you can feel the tangible rawness of this car and the drama level is pegged at a full 11.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - In the pits at CTMP's DDT.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - Raging Bull.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - To access the car’s starter button, you first have to lift a red cover. It’s almost as if the car is asking: “Are you really sure you are ready to fire up the V12?” The rest of the switchgear is pretty straightforward with large buttons to access submenus of the car’s infotainment system, which uses a rotary controller similar to the Audi MMI.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - The instrument cluster houses a configurable screen whose display changes according to which mode has been selected by the driver.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - The instrument cluster houses a configurable screen whose display changes according to which mode has been selected by the driver.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - Accessing the cabin requires flexibility, visibility is problematic at best, and even simple manoeuvres like parallel parking require a great deal of care. So, living with the Aventador S as a daily driver requires a high degree of commitment.

2017 Lamborghini Aventador S - The Lamborghini Aventador S is not for the faint of heart. It’s bold, it’s wild, it’s dramatic, it requires a high level of commitment both on the track and as a daily driver and it is an absolute blast to drive.