Features
Blown away
No perceptible body lurch can be felt through these fast, open curves, yet the suspension retains a supple flow over ridges and camber changes in the road surface.
The quick-reacting steering becomes ever livelier in its responses as the forces build through the tyres, worn on glitzy 19-inch split-rim alloys. Also, the huge cross-drilled, inner-ventilated brakes remain reassuringly strong in the messages they're flooding back.
Once more there's the ever-present awareness of crushing speed available at my slightest whim, coupled to that eardrum-hammering, nerve-mangling noise again, the dominant characteristic of any time you could hope to snatch in this car.
My foot pushes harder against the accelerator pedal in the cramped, off-set footwell, as my right hand flicks through second, third and fourth gears. The engine shrieks away, the forces threatening to carry my brain right through to another time zone.
'The engine shrieks away, the forces threatening to carry my brain right through to another time zone'
With an urge to rev hard into fifth gear now too, the realisation arrives that the next turn at these speeds could so easily be straight into the state penitentiary. Not to mention the confiscation of a $195,000 (or around £110,000, for British customers) supercar.
A vastly preferable alternative presents itself - a sign pointing to the appropriately named Star Island.
Basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal and Cuban-American songstress Gloria Estefan have properties here, alongside the chairman of a certain pharmaceuticals multi-national who's said to have spent $54 million of the proceeds from sales of erectile dysfunction drugs on the creation of a huge, pseudo-Italianate mansion.
Taking one glance at a Lamborghini convertible in a very Miami shade of blue, the security guard at the entrance to this private enclave smirks knowingly and waves me in, no questions asked.
The revs hunt up and down as the V10 struggles to readjust its fuelling, the manifolds crackling away as they begin to cool.
Behaving impeccably for the CCTV cameras, I pull over, switch off and wait as the hit of adrenaline still thumping through my temples begins to recede. This is the calm, after the storm.
Peter Grunert
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