Lamborghini Veneno Roadster Photos and Info – News – Car and Driver

 

Lamborghini Veneno Roadster Photos and Info – News – Car and Driver.

 

 

 

If Lamborghini’s debut of the radical 740-hp, three-off Veneno hypercar at this year’s Geneva auto show was as attention-grabbing as Miley Cyrus doing anything, then it’s safe to distinguish the roadster version you see here as the equivalent of Cyrus’s celebratory hosting of Saturday Night Live. Indeed, prepare to have any notions you might have of a roadster totally interrupted. While just as fantasyland as the Veneno coupe, the roadster will be three-times less rare, thanks to a nine-car production run, yet be more expensive, with pricing set at $4.5 million.

Let’s break down where that heady figure comes from, shall we? The Veneno’s monocoque is derived from the Aventador LP700-4’s and is entirely made of carbon fiber, which ain’t cheap. All of its body panels are made from the stuff, too. Inside, nearly everything is rendered from the lightweight material, and the seatbacks are even made from Lamborghini’s unique forged composite material. To this wedge of carbon fiber is bolted the same 740-hp, 6.5-liter V-12 and seven-speed single-clutch ISR automated manual transmission found in the Veneno coupe. The whole shebang rides on a laydown, pushrod-actuated suspension, and despite a full all-wheel-drive system, total dry weight stands at a feathery 3285 pounds.

For a list price $500,000 higher than the coupe’s, you’ll also get 100-percent less roof. We’re not talking about a retractable job here: The Veneno roadster does not have and is not available with a roof. The car might cost upward of $4.5 million, but a poncho only costs a couple bucks and is lighter than a roof panel. Besides, roofs are for pansies—if you can’t handle the elements, buy an Aventador roadster and use the $4 million you saved to buy back some dignity.

Of course, the roadster inherits the coupe’s brutal-yet-beautiful styling, which takes Lambo’s signature look and kicks it in the teeth with a pair of radioactive boots. The front end essentially comprises everything from the windshield header down, with the profile plunging down a nearly constant arc to the tip of the super-low, arrow-shaped prow of the hood. A carbon-fiber ground-effects package juts and angles its way around the lower fascia to the body sides, where it splits just before the rear wheel to visually separate the rear fender bulges from the main fuselage. The Countach-style canted fender openings lend the impression the car is shouldering into the force of the atmosphere it’s pushing through at hyper-legal speeds, and the adjustable rear wing can be tilted to match.

Between the rear-wing adjustment settings printed right on each wing cap and the vents, channels, and ducts carved throughout the body, the overall impression is one of hard-core purposefulness. Critically, the roadster gets the same LMP-like dorsal fin that runs from the aft of the cabin to the rearmost point of the car, bisecting the rear wing along the way.

Aerodynamic Lingerie

Like sexy underthings, all of this barely-there clothing merely serves as the warm-up to real deal: the Veneno’s insane performance. Lamborghini claims the roadster can hit 221 mph, identical to the coupe, and charge to 62 mph in just 2.9 seconds. We’d be willing to go out on a limb and offer that the performance is almost irrelevant—emphasis on the word “almost”—since so few will be made that it’s just as unlikely mere mortals will ever drive one. The car’s capabilities seemingly exist in abstract, there to justify the price and prop up its poster-car image as much as to reward the nine folks lucky enough to buy one.

If you do happen to stumble across one, perhaps at an auto show or a Pebble Beach event a few decades from now, the biggest treat will be to simply behold one of the most extreme road-going race-car analogues extant. And maybe even to hear it—after all, a big chunk of the Veneno’s power advantage over the “mainstream” 691-hp Aventador comes thanks to exhaust tweaks. The Aventador sounds nice. We imagine it sounds even nicer when it’s de-restricted and the roof’s been torn off. Now excuse us while we go figure out how to make piles upon piles of money, because as nice as the Veneno roadster is to look at, we sure as hell want to drive one.