Lamborghini Aventador

In years gone by, driving a V12 Lamborghini across a continent would have been bruising, but the Aventador changes that. It still has all the ingredients you’d expect – jaw-dropping looks, scissor doors and an immensely powerful engine – yet is surprisingly refined. The gearbox could be slicker, and the engine only truly finds its voice when really pushed, but this is a genuine Lambo that sets new standards for the firm.

The Bavarian capital of Munich is about 350 miles from Sant’Agata, Italy – the home of Lamborghini – and you need to cross three countries, plus one of the world’s most famous mountain passes, to get there. Take the back route through Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and you also encounter one of Germany’s longest stretches of de-restricted autobahn.

What better route, then, to give the Italian firm’s Aventador its most thorough workout since it was launched earlier this year? We took the keys to a jet black model and strapped ourselves in for the road trip of a lifetime.

Our home for the next two days is behind the wheel, and first impressions are good. The seats are narrow yet comfortable, the all-new 690bhp 6.5-litre V12 engine fires easily and driving the supercar out of the factory gates is a doddle. There’s also a larger luggage space in the nose than the car’s predecessor, the Murcielago, ever had.

And the surprises keep on coming. It’s a beautiful cruiser – more in keeping with a grand tourer than the brutal supercar it replaces. At 80-90mph, it glides over the road and, in the mildest of its three chassis settings, it gives quiet enough progress for occupants to talk without having to raise their voices.

The V12 hums calmly in the background, and the single-clutch gearbox slips through the ratios seamlessly – although it’s more satisfying to take control yourself via the paddles rather than rely on the ponderous automatic mode.

Our first stop is the beautiful Italian spa town of Merano. As we discover, however, Merano on a Monday afternoon is busier than a shopping centre on Christmas Eve, so we make our escape in search of roads that better suit the Aventador’s pace. The sunny Po Valley is a distant memory as the mountains of the Brenner Pass close in with menacing clouds. The road here starts to climb into the Alps, winding up from Bolzano in beautiful, constant-radius sweeps that run alongside vineyards, ski fields, thick pine forests and huge castles.

It’s now that the Aventador comes alive. Its front end keeps your fingertips full of information, while the rear settles on to the outside of its tyres and begs you to squeeze the throttle earlier out of every corner. As for the ride, what happened to bone-crushing Lambos of the past? The faster it goes, the softer it seems.

As we near Austria, the heavens open, but this barely bothers the Aventador’s huge cross-section tyres. The only intrusive sounds come from water hitting the wheelarches and the wipers on the glass. Is this V12 simply too quiet for a supercar?

There’s only one way to find out. The town of Garmisch – famous for its enormous ski jump – is where one of the best autobahns in Germany begins, with no speed limit for 46 miles until the outskirts of Munich. It’s not straight or flat, either; more like a multi-lane rollercoaster.

The fast lane is dominated by businessmen in big Audis and Mercedes, and there’s more Porsche 911 GT3 RSs per mile here than anywhere else in the world. Yet even Stuttgart’s finest can’t get close to the Lambo.

Spot a gap in the traffic, and the Aventador hits 155mph with ease. Even on part throttle, it hunkers down and squirts into the distance. At full throttle, anywhere above 6,000rpm, the acceleration scrambles your brain and the engine opens its lungs with a bellow of induction and an orchestra of exhaust notes.

The fastest we managed was 199mph, but the fuss-free way in which it achieved that suggests the 217mph top speed is well within reach. Slowing down is an experience to be savoured, too. The huge carbon-ceramic discs prefer an initial brush to push some weight on to the nose before you really stamp on them.

Our Lambo wasn’t perfect, though. Its black paint required constant cleaning, while the front number plate bracket bent and came off when we drove through an automatic car wash. The other nasty surprise was at the pumps on one part of the route – the Aventador guzzled 65 litres of fuel in just 186 miles for a wallet-shredding average of 13mpg.

But you get what you pay for. No supercar this side of a Bugatti Veyron copes with such high speeds so easily, yet even the Veyron doesn’t have the Aventador’s agility.

The beauty of its technical advances – such as the McLaren MP4-12C-style carbon tub and push-rod suspension – is that Lamborghini doesn’t let you see them. And the scary thing for rivals is that the car is this talented, yet still has room to develop.