What I Discovered on My Flash Drive

The first thing I did with my 2013 Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 Roadster, the half-million-dollar beast of a sports car I was recently allowed to possess for five days, was drive it to pick up my daughter from detention. She’d been busted for talking in Biology.

 I pulled the car — it resembles a growling alien insect — into her high school’s parking lot, and I half-accidentally revved the engine as I came into view. The resulting snort of sound made six dozen pairs of eyeballs swivel in our direction. The only way I can describe this blast is to borrow a phrase from the rock critic Lester Bangs: “imperative groin thunder.” I felt like an idiot. But I went with it.

I am not, it’s safe to say, the sort of person who guns car engines — especially trophy-car engines. I dislike flashiness out of temperament, and also out of fear that I can’t pull it off. No one wants to be the kind of person a comedian once described this way: a hopeless outfielder who wears a paisley glove.

I’ve mostly owned rusted-out Jeeps and Volvos, the nondescript Carhartts and Levi’s of the automotive world. I’ve long assured myself that I don’t really care what I drive. But then I put Hattie, my daughter, into the Aventador’s passenger seat and we roared home along the roads of rural western New Jersey, where we live. At the tap of the gas pedal, the landscape turned into a smear. So this is what a 691-horsepower engine feels like. The sensation was akin to (as another writer has put it) horizontal bungee jumping. Here’s an itch, I recall thinking, I could get used to scratching.

 This roadster, a two-seater with removable carbon-fiber roof panels, is a slight revision of the original Aventador, first issued in 2011. (Like most Lamborghinis, it is named after a fighting bull.) Over the engine bay, there are two futuristic hexagonal windows. These allow the engine to cool, and for oglers to ogle.

 The automotive press has fallen hard for the Aventador in both of its iterations. Motor Trend said the original was “the friendliest V12 supercar in the world.” Car and Driver called the roadster “the best Lamborghini ever.” The guys on BBC’s “Top Gear” didn’t just name the original Aventador the best supercar of 2011, they raced it down a runway against an F-16 fighter jet. (The car won.) They taught viewers how to grill sausages on the blue flames that you can make come out of the exhaust. Recommended cooking time? “Five blips at 8,250 r.p.m. for 15 seconds.”

 This vaguely satanic conveyance was delivered to me on Halloween day, driven out from Manhattan by Michael Lock, who at the time was Lamborghini’s chief operating officer.

He’s a witty Briton who resembles an early-middle-age version of the cartoon character Speed Racer. He has the kind of sheepishly happy countenance that porn stars and wine critics also tend to have, guys who are aware they’ve got it good. (Lamborghini terminated his contract a few weeks after he lent me the car. I hope these events are not related.)

I live on a village street that was about to be flooded with some 400 candy-seeking children in costumes, and the first thing I asked Mr. Lock was: Is this thing safe to park here, right in front of the house? To my surprise, he said yes. Sports cars that cost more than the average American makes in a decade don’t seem, circa 2013, to engender class acrimony. It’s different in parts of Europe, he explained, where social tensions bite the surface of everyday life.

The Aventador, Mr. Lock predicted, would simply make people happy — and it did. Photo flashes popped all Halloween night as people posed with the white insect. New Jersey’s motto is the Garden State, which is ridiculous; this is the Gearhead State.

We got used to the attention. When you drive an Aventador, a car that goes from zero to 60 miles per hour in 2.9 seconds, you leave smartphone camera flashes popping in your wake almost wherever you go, often from cars that weave dangerously behind or alongside you. This frantic attention is as close as you will ever come, you think, to understanding what it felt like to be Gina Lollobrigida in 1955.

The attention, sad to say, is mostly from men. High-performance sports cars are a bro thing. Men will scamper across six busy lanes of Interstate (as two did while I was pulled into an A & W burger stand) just to run over to pull at their crotches and ask you about the transmission. Women mostly wince as if they’ve caught a whiff of your Axe Body Spray.

Having an Aventador parked outside your house makes you ask questions you don’t normally ask yourself, such as: What would Charlie Sheen do?

It’s difficult to think about Lamborghinis without calling to mind the kind of guys who’ve owned them. Donald Trump and Guy Fieri, for example. (Mr. Fieri’s was recently stolen.) Also Chris Brown, the rapper with anger management problems, who had his Aventador painted to match his Nike sneakers. Justin Bieber reportedly got six speeding tickets while driving an Aventador in Dubai. What did Tom Cruise’s heartless yuppie do for a living in “Rain Man”? He imported Lamborghinis.

 On the other hand, Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis were once upon a time Lamborghini owners. And rappers have uttered some delicious lines about them. In his song “To the World,” Kanye West declares: “Pulled up in the A-V-entador / And the doors, raise up, like praise the Lord / Did the fashion show, and a tour, and a movie, and a score / This a ghetto opera, Francis Foreign Car Coppola.”

Francis Foreign Car Coppola. That line sticks in your mind the next morning as you open the scissor doors by sliding them up, so that they resemble the wings of a fly, and climb into the low-slung cockpit.

 To start the engine of an Aventador, you don’t insert a key and turn clockwise. Instead, you flip open a small red lid on the center console and punch a fat hexagonal button. This doesn’t resemble starting a car. This resembles launching a nuclear strike. There’s a sense of apocalypse, now. The motor’s ensuing k-boom adds verisimilitude.

 The Aventador is not made for rattling around town. The ride is jerky on nonpristine roads. At times it felt as if I’d put 25 cents into a toddler’s bucking bronco ride. At low speeds, the engine whines like a wedge of pit bulls kept on a choke collar.

 Another reason you don’t want to drive this car around town is that there’s little visibility to the sides and rear. Although Lamborghinis are made in Italy, in this respect they are the paradigmatic American car — they permit no retrospection. You would not want to parallel-park one.

A road trip, clearly, was called for. I tend to ask myself, in moments of indecision, not what Charlie Sheen would do, but what Willie Nelson or Christopher Hitchens would do. They are imperfect heroes, but heroes nonetheless.

This is why I set off to drive a few hundred miles west with my son, Penn, to catch a Merle Haggard show in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. At 76, the Hag has still got it, though his fan base now seems to consist of ornery granddads with patchy Elvis sideburns. Willie would be picky about the road music. I made sure the (sweet) new Shonna Tucker and Eye Candy album was downloaded onto my iPhone.

From there we headed, the next morning, two hours south to Harrisburg to visit (for the Hitchens aspect of the trip) the palatial Midtown Scholar used bookstore, one of America’s largest academic used bookstores. A visit here is an essentially religious experience. Vaut le voyage, as the Michelin guides like to say.

On the way, how fast did we drive? (The car’s maximum speed is 217 m.p.h.) Faster than I am willing to admit. Fast enough, if only for short bursts and only when the highway was clear, that I could imagine either A) being Tasered by a state trooper or B) blasting off into low orbit over the Monongahela Valley.

Airliners take off at 140 to 180 m.p.h. It’s not a joke to suggest that this car, which does 200 m.p.h. without thinking hard about it, could get airborne.

The Aventador is an intuitive monster to drive. I got the hang of it almost immediately. It has paddle gear shifters on either side of the steering wheel. The all-wheel drive grips the road the way a lizard grips the side of a tree.

The car’s three driving modes — Strada, Sport and Corsa — adjust the engine settings for increasing velocity. The car rides low, and there’s a hydraulic nose lift that raises the front suspension, for moments when you’re worried about scraping the tarmac. It’s impossible to use this lift to get the Aventador bouncing the way the cars do in Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” video. Not that we didn’t try. 

Stopped at intersections, the engine quickly (and unnervingly) goes to sleep. As you prepare to pull away it instantly restarts, using high-performance capacitors known as supercaps to awaken the engine.

That engine is in the rear. A minuscule front luggage compartment has room for perhaps a squash racket, a laptop and a few bottles of Piper-Heidsieck. That’s about it. Your valet can follow in a separate car with the rest of your baggage. And with your children.

Plutocrats are unlike you and me in another way, beyond not traveling with their own luggage. They apparently don’t drink coffee in their cars. The Aventador has no cup holders.

Danica Patrick, the Nascar driver, got at this issue and others when she told a British interviewer: “In the Lamborghini, I have to avoid certain roads because of potholes, and there’s nowhere to put my drink, no cup holder. And I’m not going to lie, it looks pretentious. I used to think it was cool to, like, drive it to dinner. Now? Like I really need to be looked at anymore.”

 You do feel safe in the Aventador. It fits snugly, almost the way Robert Downey Jr.’s carapace does in the “Iron Man” movies. Still, you can’t help but think about something Clive James said of Formula One cars: that a good smash will “still do to a driver what it would do to an egg in a steel box, no matter how tightly the box fitted.”

Most of the metaphors that blindingly fast cars call to mind are sexual. (All that torque and thrust.) I’ll save these for my therapist. But there’s a strong sense of tantric self-control when driving a high-performance car at poky legal speeds.

This kind of self-control is exhausting. I collapsed in hotel rooms at the end of each day’s drive. My neck muscles had also been clenched, I realized, from worrying about speed traps. 

The Aventador will not help you get a date with a member of the Natural Resources Defense Council. It gets about 12 m.p.g. in combined city-highway driving. A 2013 survey found it to be the most fuel-inefficient car on the planet. The annual gas bill was estimated at more than $5,000.

 The novelist Kingsley Amis once wrote that a surefire hangover cure is a short flight in an open-cockpit airplane. I suspect that a brief spin in the Aventador would accomplish the same thing.

 I’d never own one, even if I could. But I miss it already.