Lamborghini Murcielago Roadster

Nick Hall explains why you need one. Now.

Moreno Conti, Lamborghini’s impossibly cool test driver, looks to the heavens when he mentions the word Audi. He has been with the company for 23 years, has seen too many owners come and go and knows full well that Audi has not only bought this company back from the brink, it has taken it back to the top with the Murcielago Roadster.

At rest...at last

Ingolstadt’s involvement with this free spirit isn’t welcome in some quarters, but people like Moreno know it has pumped in funds, manufacturing skills, four-wheel-drive technology and quality control to back up the Italian marque’s flamboyant designs, and have had only the mildest influence on the looks.

They took over from the shadowy syndicate that included Tommy Suharto, son of his Indonesia’s President that was later questioned in connection with contract killings after a long time on the run. So had Stelios walked through the door and announced EasyLambo it would still have been an improvement.

Look and feel

It’s a common complaint, though, that the top-shelf Lambo looks like a German car. And while Lamborghini’s design chief Luc Donckerwolke is actually a Peruvian-born Belgian, it’s fair to say he’s steeped in the VW Audi Group’s design ‘flair’ culture after penning the A4 Avant, R8 Le Mans and Skoda’s Octavia and Fabia before heading to Lamborghini in 1998.

And yes, there are a few vents and switches pulled from the Audi parts bin, but Ferrari raids the Fiat stock list and there’s not much of a comparison to be made there. Indeed the interior feels screwed together in a way that will last for decades, with none of the Italian eccentricities of decades past.

The Murcielago is no less beautiful for its ‘German’ influence, as proved by the three-near crashes that occurred as we parked by a main road for static shots. To my mind this car is sexier in the flesh than the Carrera GT, which looks like the front and back were built by separate teams while even the Enzo is more imposing than beautiful. That’s the company the Murcielago Roadster keeps, even though it’s substantially cheaper, and the extreme wedge shape is distinctive, purposeful and going down well with the buying public.

Donckerwolke doesn’t like open-topped cars. So the illusion of a closed canopy is a deliberate one, even though it meant fiddling with the roofline and filling in the rear windows to present the image of a roof structure. Two rollover hoops snaffled from the A4 will pop up to protect you in the event of a flip, although if I’d just flipped my Lambo I might actually prefer death.

The uncompromising design extends to the roof, incidentally, which has all the structural integrity of a Kinder Egg toy.

It takes old hands 10 minutes to assemble, comes with its own instruction book and, with this badly fitting toupee in place, the car is rated to just 100mph lest it blow away. Lamborghini reasons if you’ve got the cash for their finest, you’ve got the money to buy something else for rainy days.

You could drive the better looking coupé in near storm conditions. It lacks the expensive carbon body of the rest of the super-elite, relying on a reinforced spaceframe, but it has a secret weapon. It employs four-wheel-drive through a viscous coupling, anti-squat and dive technology, two limited slip diffs providing 45 per cent locking capability at the rear and 25 per cent at the front and Audi influenced traction control technology.

That’s an awful lot of help, but it’s there for a reason. The Roadster has shocking weight distribution: 42/58 front/rear, which means the back will step out before the driver aids kick in to drag the car from the corner. It’s a bad plan for a fast lap but, for hooligan thrills, it’s hard to beat and the built-in safety catches are so good you can release the wheel on the exit of bends, plant the throttle and the car will sort it all out.

Considering most of the people with £212,000 to spend on a car will play football or shake their booty on MTV, any help the car can provide is bound to be a good thing. The very fact that half will opt for the roadster, and again half will go for the fiddly and frustrating, semi-automatic e-gear system, tells you everything you need to know about their driving ambitions.

Performance

And you might think it detracts from the driving experience, but if you can get bored behind the wheel of a 6.2-litre, 570bhp rocket then nothing on these pages is really going to interest you.

It howls past 60mph in less than 3.6s and goes on to a top speed of 200mph, slightly less than the coupe due to the messed-up aerodynamics of the chop top. It doesn’t need a detailed explanation of in-gear acceleration, other than to say it could scorch the skin off your face.

The Audi-sourced V12 generates 479lb/ft of torque, it’s got pace to burn and needs replacement tyres for the 18x13 inch rear wheels €1000 a pop every 7000km. If there was ever a time when this seemed like a reasonable bill, this might be it.

Driving it

Find a clear road and light the touch paper and the rear wheels spin momentarily before the car blasts down the road with all the aggression and purpose of a serial killer on the run.

The engine note hardens to one of the best sounds in motoring, the speedo races round to illegal speeds and the scenery races past the window at a bullet-train rate. Push hard on the throttle and prepare to hang on. It’s an emotional experience driving a Lamborghini in full flight and, on one brief stretch of B-road, yes B-road, I had 230kph on the clock, with all the tyres scrabbling for grip the whole way there.

It is one of those moments that will remain with me forever and, if I had Chelsea owner style funds clogging up my bank accounts, I’d probably call on Lamborghini before the folks at Maranello. Just.

Now, 10 years ago that statement would have been greeted with snorts of derisory laughter. Now you could stand up in a room full of car nuts, state clearly and concisely that Lamborghini now makes better cars than the Prancing Horse and not be thrown out.

Audi has clearly been a Godsend to all of us.

Thanks to Jakob Ebrey for the photos

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iansull

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