Posted by Tom Ford at 12:06 pm on Tuesday August 25, 2009
The SV is not a subtle car. As soon as it appears, childish you starts jabbering and capering about in your head: ‘Look! It’s got a massive wing! And look, the exhaust is a lozenge-shaped cave… And it’s so BIG, and WIDE and NOISY and orange’. You are reduced to a state of pure gawp.
It’s what a supercar should be: utterly enthralling. You can’t take your eyes off it, in case it does something amazing, like explode, or transform into a helicopter gunship.
Drive it, and the SV gets even better: a proper dramatic treat. This isn’t Casualty, it’s King Lear with machine guns and real bullets. This is how supercars used to be in the glittery and inaccurate halls of my memory.
Being honest, 12-year-old me wants all supercars to be huge, wide, dramatic things that make people fall over and girls wave and smile even when you’re fugly. Noisy, immature, socially irresponsible. Massively expensive. Metallic orange with the big wing pack.
But there’s a problem: thirty-plus me needs a car that delivers. Middle age brings feelings of self-worth based around exactly how damn fast this thing is. There would be nothing worse than having all the flame-spitting gurning if the SV wasn’t devastatingly, rub-your-nose-in-it, sod-off-and-die fast.
But it is.
It’s one of the few cars on the planet that can wear that rear wing, eyeball-searing Tango paint, be wider than a Victorian terrace and still have more trouser than mouth.
Inside it’s all carbon fibre and transmission tunnel, generous slathers of alcantara and something… else. Intimidation. Whiffy fear. The nose dips away in front, the glassy lozenges stacked across that rampant V12 flick light out back. It’s pure theatre and the better for it.
Twisting the key produces a whirr replaced suddenly by a revvy bark. Heads snap around and little boys point. Good. That’s what I’m talking about.
And when you watch the Stig going hard, you see the car’s rear-biased four-wheel drive understeering slightly, then monstering to power-oversteer.
In fact, we had trouble getting the Stig out of it. We had to threaten to burn him out, by the end.
Suffice to say that everything you hope the Lamborghini Murciélago LP670-4 SV might be, it is. Which, when something makes this many visual promises, is a very big compliment indeed.
Watch Stig lapping the TG GP ‘09 cars: Aston Vantage V12, Ferrari 599 HGTE, KTM X-Bow, Porsche 911 GT3, Nissan 370Z, Renaultsport Clio 200 Cup and Audi R8 V10.
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