Lamborghini Aventador S Roadster 2018 first drive

Opportunities for those who would like an open-air supercar with no fewer than twelve mid-mounted cylinders are thin on the ground.

There is the fantastical £2.3million Pagani Huayra Roadster or the Lamborghini  Aventador Roadster, which is now available in heavily revised S form, driven here.

Even at £251,462 before some exorbitantly priced options (it costs £820 to have the calipers painted black, for example), the Lamborghini is a snip relative to its compatriot, and, but for a pair of 25kg carbonfibre roof panels that unclip easily enough and slot into braces in the luggage compartment under the bonnet, it's Lamborghini mechanically identical to its much-improved coupé sibling.

As such, were you to strip away the carbonfibre-and-aluminium bodywork, you’d find push-rod suspension – à la Ferrari Enzo and Porsche Carrera GT – with retuned in-board spring-and-damper units and driveshafts leading to all four corners.

There's also now four-wheel steering, and 90% of torque can now be put through the comically broad 355-section Pirellis at the rear, up from 80%.

You’d also find Lamborghini’s atmospheric 60deg 6.5-litre engine, with a firing order of 1-12-4-8-2-11-6-7-3-10-6-8. It spins out to 8500rpm and develops 730bhp (previously 690bhp) a scant 100rpm before that point.

Those figures alone tell almost everything you need to know about the frenzied experience of driving an Aventador S Roadster. Its response to throttle openings isn’t as savagely immediate as that of Lamborghini the Huracán Performante’s V10, but the tone it produces is broad, grittily metallic and seemingly without even a gram of fat. With the roof off, it’s a continuous delight. And when a downpour during testing necessitated a speedy roof installation (a scramble lasting at most two minutes), the tiny rear screen, once lowered via a toggle switch on the dashboard, allowed in a tremendous amount of cam scream and exhaust blare anyway.

Taller drivers won’t appreciate the pillbox-style view ahead, and the car feels big and intimidating out on the road in a manner absent in lesser supercars. Its width (and this is excluding mirrors) is such that even if you line things up to perfection, the bodywork still can't negotiate the 6’6” width-restrictors originally put in place to stop lorries. So extensive is the chassis that for those first few hundred metres, the steering column feels ten feet long, and adjusting the rudimentary air vents that bookend the dash requires a whole-hearted lunge, arm outstretched.