Retro review: Lamborghini Murciélago LP640 Roadster

This review first appeared in Issue 162 of Top Gear magazine (2007)

Badass. It isn’t a term I’d have used to describe this car if left to my own devices, but the excited young Californian guy who stopped his motorbike to talk to us as we photographed the new Lamborghini Murciélago LP640 Roadster used the phrase as soon as he heard the engine spec. A 6.5-litre V12 revving to 8,000rpm, pumping out 631bhp and capable of pushing the car to 205mph? And it looks like this?

“That is a badass car.”

Yes, it is. We needn’t dwell on what badass means precisely – ‘naughty bottom car’ or ‘antisocial derrière car’ doesn’t quite have the same yank jive assonance. But badass has perfect assonance.

Not only is it the most badass Lamborghini of all, you could argue that Lambo makes the most badass cars of all. Ipso facto, this is the most badass car of all. Drive it for more than three seconds and you’ll have no reason to think differently.

Minus a roof, the Roadster is even more evil to look at than the Murciélago LP640 coupe, and that thing’s a physical shock when you see it on the road. This masterpiece is visually stimulating enough to make pedestrian onlookers’ heads explode in showers of blood and brain matter – I saw it happen, I swear; a mind-ripping concept car made real, then given one of the world’s most fabulous engines and plenty of development time with some of the world’s great chassis engineers and test drivers. It is a brutal, beautiful supercar, styled by Luc Donckerwolke, a Peruvian-born Belgian who’s done the Italians proud. This is a car that does justice to the great Miura and other Italian supercars drawn on paper by proper maestros, sporting a cigarette in one hand and a pencil in the other. Long may that style continue.

Let’s enjoy this monster while cars like this are allowed to exist. Its shock-and-awe visual power comes from its ungodly lowness and extreme width, combined with its incredible proportions in profile, with that cab-forward stance and a long, long tail. It doesn’t need a giant rear wing, nor any aerodynamic addenda – the large scoops in the flanks pop out at speed to help cool the engine. Look at the exhaust pipe: you’d need to double-check you knew where the dog was before starting up. Viewed from dead rear, the tail strakes blend inward toward the cabin and flank the bonnet in a twisting, crazy warp of vents and lines. The engine cover is still too high to let you see much out of the central rearview mirror, but it doesn’t matter – looking behind is one of the least important things you’ll do in this car.

A roof is packed into the small boot beneath the nose, but frankly it’s an apology, a difficult-to-fit canvas contraption that is an emergency get-you-home. It can only be used at speeds below 100mph, so it’s particularly useless in the LP640 Roadster, which is capable of more than double that.

We surely don’t need that roof contraption today. It’s a perfect, crisp Los Angeles December morning and one of America’s great roads beckons – Highway 74, the Ortega Highway, which winds across the hills between Lake Elsinore and San Juan Capistrano.

It’s an event, this car – an occasion on four 18-inch wheels. It starts with the styling, of course, as you walk up to the car, then you dip a handle beside the glass and raise the scissor door straight up. Magnificent. Sliding in is easy, and you find yourself sitting in a body-hugging bucket seat that’s not quite as comfortable as it should be, and a driving position that’s not quite as natural as it should be. You sit miles away from the dash and even more miles behind the incredible sloping windscreen, behind a wheel that telescopes out a long, long way. It’s almost – but not quite – far enough to prevent a classic long-arm, short-leg Italian driving position. My legs were way too splayed with the wheel up close where I needed it, but I didn’t care and neither would you. Obviously the car feels wide and low and strange, but you soon get used to it – as soon as you move away, you feel that the big Lambo’s on your side. It is not daunting.

The new dials are attractive and easy to use and far more appealing than the stuck-in Kenwood Afterthought Model nav/stereo system, which is a crime on a car of this price – about £200,000 – but somehow appealing too. There are traces of Italian-ness here that the German masters of Lamborghini seem to understand. Does it really matter that the cabin still feels a bit thrown together, despite the improvement in fit and finish instigated by Audi? No. Nothing matters, not the stereo, not the build quality, nothing. Just fire up the engine, get driving and start forgetting every reference you ever had with normal cars. Here we go – time to explore this thing’s explosive performance.

And here the Murciélago LP640 Roadster reveals its greatest trick – the driving experience lives up to and then surpasses the expectation you build up from the car’s appearance. Walking around it, looking at it and sitting in it just doesn’t in any way prepare you for how fabulous it is to drive; to accelerate, brake, corner and – perhaps most unforgettably of all – to listen to.

The V12’s starter turns over gruffly for three seconds before the recalcitrant big lump cranks into life. At tickover it sounds like the sort of unit any decent tractor manufacturer (like Lamborghini) would produce – like a tractor. There is a mechanical threshing noise from the top end, a bit like that made by your grandma’s sewing machine – it’s pure machinery, with no aural excellence whatever. Nowhere near as sonorous as a V6 Golf, for instance, and something tweaks your brain to think that you might start to become disappointed. But it doesn’t matter. Tickover means nothing to an engine like this. It doesn’t want to tick over.

Blip the throttle and it sounds beefier, more tonal and... badass, and the chassis twitches in response. But not much – it is immensely tortionally strong, this chopped car, helped by extra carbon-fibre crossbracing in the engine bay. Only the very harshest potholes induce any shake in the steering column and dash. Lambo has got this bit dead right, and the claimed weights for coupe and Roadster are the same. It is quite heavy, tipping the scales at 1,665kg. It’s four-wheel drive too, remember, its electronic Viscous Traction system delivering up to 100 per cent of torque to the front or rear axles, depending on conditions – in normal driving, 70 per cent of drive is delivered to the rear wheels.

We’re aboard the clutch pedal-less manual E-gear model here, which is slightly disappointing – I’d always choose a manual over even the best of these paddle-shift systems. Changing gear is an event when you have an open gate, and your brain imprints the motion of each change, so you remember where you are in the ’box. Not here – one flick is the same as another, so it would take a while to get to know the car and the engine revs at various speeds. Not to worry, flick the right-hand paddle toward you – right is up, left is down – and the automatic clutch engages smoothly, moving the big car away.

Let’s clack the badass throttle pedal all the way to the badass cabin floor as soon as it’s warm. Now we’re moving. I drove the previous Murciélago – and the Diablo and Countach before that – and this thing is much, much faster. Not sure whether it clicked with you how new and wonderful this Murciélago in LP640 form is, but take it from me, it is properly rapid, a mind-shattering car.

The engine revs smoothly and quickly. There’s plenty of torque down low, then as the needle rips up the rev range, things start to get hairy – the howl gets deeper, the thrust harder and suddenly the ’box has changed up for you at about 8,000rpm – 62mph arrives in 3.4secs, 0.4secs quicker than its predecessor. Badass.

Cornering is epic. The balance is largely neutral and you never get the impression the car is particularly heavy. It changes direction with great confidence, and the steering transmits an amazing amount of feel, especially when you get to the point when the tyres start to make a soft ‘swish’ sound and you approach the limit of adhesion.

That’s when you need the steering to communicate with you and it does, lightening up just enough to let you know you’re about to run short of grip. Grab another gear in this state and the nose jerks inward quite violently as the throttle comes off, but not enough to unsettle the tail – there’s too much grip for that.

Probably the best way to slide this car on dry tarmac would be to trail-brake into a corner – the brakes seem to have enough rear bias to encourage that sort of behaviour, but you’d be going so fast at entry that you’d need a track to prove it. Or at least, I would. Speeds are very high when you get to the limit of these tyres (13 inches wide at the rear).

The cockpit remains relatively quiet and free of buffeting, no matter what speed you’re doing, but taller drivers will get a slightly uncomfortable blast of air to the very top of their heads – that air was hitting my noggin at pretty high speeds on the way back to Santa Ana, but at no point was I anything other than comfortable.

No supercar gets close to this thing, and possibly never will. Maybe we’ve reached a zenith here – maybe the Germans will put too much German-ness into the Murciélago’s replacement. I won’t (and you probably won’t) ever have the sort of wealth to be able to throw away £200,000 on a car. But anyone who is that lucky should put the LP640 on their list.

It makes the Gallardo Roadster seem about as hard as a Kia Picanto 1.0S. It really is that badass.

Verdict: More dramatic than the LP640 coupe and as a result the most dramatic car there is.

6.5-litre V12 
631bhp, 4WD
0-62mph in 3.4secs, max speed 205mph
1,665kg
£200,000