Lamborghini Reventon first drive

It’s one of two things. Or it’s both. It’s either a Murcielago LP640 with an (in-house) bodykit or, as they’d prefer you to think, the Reventon is the Lamborghini Murcielago as pure art.

Either way, it’s fast – and it looks faster than the donor car.

Lamborghini took a straw poll of long-time customers and found they wanted something a little more exclusive than a Murcielago, so Lamborghini gave it to them.

It’s a new bodyshell - inspired by the Eurofighter, made in carbonfibre composite, designed by Lamborghini’s own designers and fitted in-house – bolted and glued on top of the proven Murcielago LP640 mechanicals.

They’ve done a brilliant job, too, and the angles and folds give the rear end, in particular, a coherence that the LP640 only wishes it had.

Another 10 horsepower takes the tally to 650 and, apart from ticking every box (including carbon brakes) on the option list that’s it for mechanical changes.

It’s a show-stopper. A normal Murcielago will stop traffic and turn heads. A Reventon will snap necks and clog city streets for hours.

And that’s the point, because it drives exactly like an LP640, right down to the paddle-shift gearbox that hates and jerks its way through the multi-point turns the wide turning circle demands.

It’s this system that is probably the low-light, particularly on a car with a €1 million (£670,000) price tag on it. Plus tax.

But while it’s no Porsche in its tactile feel, the Reventon is a jet in its own right.

The raucous V12 is one of the most endearingly brutal powerplants in circulation today and there’s enough performance on offer here to throw the Reventon to 62mph in just 3.4 seconds. In the wet, full throttle can spin up all four wheels, even in fifth gear. It might be mechanically identical to the LP640, but the LP640 is probably enough for most people.

The Reventon rides with incredible firmness and the barely-padded sports seats hurt after an hour, but it’s worth it.

The whole point isn’t the way it drives. The whole point is that nobody else is ever likely to turn up in anything to upstage you and you can still have it serviced at your Lambo dealer.

No. Well, you can’t anyway because Lamborghini only built 20 of them and they sold out months ago.

Even if you could find one, though, there is no intrinsic justification for paying five times the price of the (already expensive) supercar on which it’s built.

If art’s your thing, though, and LP640s are just too thick on the ground where you live, go right ahead.

Michael Taylor