S Please

At a Glance, the Aventador S Is Just Another Midlife Update. But Take a Second Look – as You Will – and You’ll See the Changes Made to the Big Lambo Are as Significant as Its Suffix.

- Amaan Ahmed

It’s four in the morning... or it at least feels like it. We’ve been shooting for hours now, and the realisation is amplified by the rather basic need to get some much-needed shut-eye. I step out of our shoot area to get some fresh air, when I hear someone whistle from the roadside.

“Can you move a little, please?” I’m standing in the way of the three bystanders and the gaze of their phone cameras, which is directed at the Aventador S.

Now, before you hit me with the ‘Mumbai never sleeps’ cliché, let me tell you 4am is an ungodly hour, even by Mumbai standards. What’s perplexing is, they’re not looking at the yellow Huracan waiting on a flatbed. They’re not looking at the blue Huracan parked outside. Somehow, they’re all gravitating towards the Aventador. But my sleep-deprived mind can still tell why – the Aventador is that kind of car. It has that effect on people.

How times change. Gone are the days when India had to wait for years to see a new car. The Aventador S only made its global debut in December, last year, and here we are, a mere three months later, in the presence of the big, bad Lambo. It’s a demo car, so the steering wheel is on the wrong side. Driving it around would have been completely illegal, so we decided to stick with the theme of the issue and take a just-about legal, closer look.

Immediately noticeable are the redone front bumper, and that large, impossibly low carbon fibre front splitter protruding from the bottom, which only serves to highlight the sheer width of the Aventador. As Lamborghini’s chief designer Mitja Borkert explains, the fin-like appendages in the front bumper – apart from bringing gains on the aerodynamics front – are actually styled to look like a snake’s fangs. Only Lamborghini does stuff like this.