First Drive: 2012 Lamborghini Aventador

I just got done driving the new Lamborghini Aventador, and I am pleased to report that it goes very fast. Also, some of them are a neat orange color, while others are white and various other hues. And it has a starter button that's covered with a red lid that you flip up like you're about to arm your Tomcat's Hellfires and smoke some Commies. Which is sort of strange when you want to turn the car off. Arm missiles! And then the engine stops. Does any of that make sense to you? It does to me, but I've just spent a few hours having my gray matter bounced around the inside of my skull by a 700-horsepower Italian rocket sled. I may, at this point, be speaking in tongues. Bunga-bunga? But let me try to convey the salient points of the Aventador. First, it's named after a bull who was very mean and probably gored and trampled a whole village, thus making him a shoe-in to lend his name to a new Lamborghini. And, in the spirit of that irate bovine, the Aventador is a mite bit ornery. It's what you might call intentionally violent. For instance, the Aventador uses a single-clutch seven-speed sequential manual transmission. While all the new dual-clutch gearboxes slur their shifts together in an endless flow of silky smoothness, the Lambo changes gears hard enough to trigger the traction control system. At perhaps 75 mph. In an all-wheel-drive car. That's if you have it in the "Corsa" mode, the most aggressive. And you may as well have it in that mode. (There are two more gentle settings for shifts and throttle response, but why bother?) The Aventador also uses pushrods. Except they're not in the engine, like all the other pushrods you know. They activate the coil-over dampers, which ride up in the middle of the car, reducing unsprung weight -- and, more important, looking cool as all hell.