Road Couture: Lamborghini Aventador vs. Ferrari F12

Two made-to-measure Italian suits show us that the right fit is a personal preference.

By Chris Chilton October 18, 2013 / Photos by Stefan Jermann Road & Track

Slideshow: Road Couture


In the beginning, God created heaven and earth and the Ferrari. And then he created Ferruccio Lamborghini, a man convinced he could have done a better job of just about all of it.
Ferruccio is long gone, but Lamborghini management, under the watchful eye of Audi, carries the same conviction. Though we've parked the Ferrari F12 and Lamborghini Aventador tail-to-tail for photography near Modena Cathedral, the Ferrari might as well feature a cloaking device for the attention it's getting.
If you told the assembled throng that the Ferrari was light-years better to drive, do you think they'd listen? Do you think they'd care? Like it or not, where supercars are concerned, visual punch is just as important as the force that pushes the Ferrari north of 211 mph and the Lamborghini almost 6 mph past that.
Staring at these two machines in the heat of an Italian summer, it's easy to forget that when Lamborghini began making cars 50 years ago, its first model was an awkward riff on Ferrari themes. The sensational Miura that followed changed everything. For more than 20 years, from the moment Ferrari's mid-engine Boxer replaced its front-engine Daytona in 1973, the two firms' range-toppers battled with their engines behind the driver. Because they handled more like race cars? Maybe. Because they resembled them, more likely.
Then, in the 1990s, Ferrari's new boss, Luca di Montezemolo, called time on the madness. He declared that Ferraris should be as drivable as Honda Civics and returned the horse to the front of the cart. Twenty miles to the north, Lamborghini told any wavering customers to grow some coglioni and carried on as before.
Stefan JermannWhich brings us to today, to a 1430-hp thrash through the Emilia-Romagna countryside in the front-engine Ferrari F12 and mid-engine Lamborghini Aventador. A wild ride that'll have us feted like celebrities, feeling like F1 stars, and stranded at the side of the road. As different as these cars might seem, they're undeniably rivals. If you're fortunate enough to have $400,000 burning a hole in the Bemberg-lined pocket of your hand-tailored pants, you simply can't consider one without the other.
I watch R&T Web Editor Alex Kierstein contemplate the impending popping of his Lamborghini cherry as he eyes the Aventador's 335-millimeter rear Pirellis outside the marque's Sant'Agata factory. This car is textbook Lamborghini: low, wide, angular. And expensive, at $404,195. Just looking at the thing is intimidating.
Dropping beneath the trademark scissor door and over the broad sill isn't as hard as it looks. Alex certainly isn't impressed with the Aventador's plastic door pull, which feels like it was swiped from a Korean compact, but the huge digital instruments, which switch from speedo to tach at the push of a button, appeal to the tech geek in all of us. And to anyone who's driven the Aventador's predecessor, the Murciélago—a car whose front seats favored those with rickets—the seat-wheel-pedal relationship is a revelation. The nav system might be borrowed from a $30,000 Audi A4, but that only means it's a cinch to use. We set our destination as Via Abetone Inferiore, lift the slightly tacky console cover over the starter button, and point the nose south.
It's a 40-minute drive to Ferrari's Maranello home along narrow two-lanes flanked by flat fields. For a country responsible for so many of the world's greatest cars and fashion houses, Italy's roads, like those in the rest of southern Europe, are almost bereft of interesting vehicles. Cars here are like the mules they replaced, mere tools to move people around. Even before the current economic downturn, price and practicality beat style and speed.
The boxy minivans filling the roads might be slow, but there are so many of them that you rarely get a chance to pass, even with 700 hp. So you exploit every half-chance, giving the huge left-hand shift paddle a few taps before letting the V-12 breathe.
Stefan JermannThis is, believe it or not, a new engine. With the death of the Murciélago, Lamborghini finally retired the V-12 it had been honing since the marque's 1960s inception. The new twelve displaces a mere 2 cc more, but the engine's internal dimensions are radically different, the near-square bore-and-stroke geometry swapped for measurements that make the cylinders look like pie plates. The old engine was gruff, if effective. But the new one positively zings, soaring beyond 8000 rpm before you have to call for another ratio from its seven-speed automated manual.
The gearbox is a vicious thing, one clutch and an infinite amount of refinement short of the Ferrari's. Shifts in Strada and Sport modes are predictably ponderous, but Corsa, the angriest setting, bangs cogs home like a Top Fuel car leaving the line. Subtlety isn't the Aventador's strong suit.
Little wonder, then, that when we arrive at Ferrari's factory, we're met with strict instructions to keep the Lamborghini outside the hallowed gates. So we park across the street, near the gift shop, and immediately cause commotion. Sales of cheap, branded pens and gauche footwear take a nosedive as the store empties and the car is swarmed. We try to look nonchalant as we flail over that sill—getting out is harder than getting in; should have practiced—lock up, and head for reception.
Knowing I had driven an Aventador before, Lamborghini simply tossed us the keys and left us to it. Knowing I hadn't driven the F12, Ferrari lays on a personal, info-heavy engineering briefing. We get the usual propaganda about carbon being reserved for Ferrari's most exclusive cars because it costs big money to do right; aluminum, they claim, is a more practical material to repair and often no heavier in execution. We hear about the latest magnetorheological dampers, which can react in five milliseconds. And we're shown a graph comparing the response of the F12's 6.3-liter V-12 with that of an unnamed 12-cylinder rival. I wonder what car that could be?
Penance served, we're finally handed the keys. After the theater of the Lamborghini, the $323,338 F12 ought to be a visual disappointment. In the conventional sense, I suppose it is, but not if you really care about cars. This isn't a beautiful Ferrari, but few are. And it's a happier result than the company's four-seat FF.
Stefan JermannIt sounds cliché, but standing next to the F12, it's hard not to appreciate how successfully it marries the needs of both engineering and style. Most obvious is the so-called Aero Bridge on each fender, which takes air passing over the hood and directs it down the car's flanks. From some angles, it's artful shadows; from others, the fender just has a brutal hole in it. All told, Ferrari says the F12 produces over 270 pounds of downforce at 125 mph, up 76 percent over the 599 GTB it replaces. How much of that is due to the fact that the car's rear apron looks like the toe of a massive camel? No one says.
Dull roads and traffic meant our journey between the two supercar camps was hardly the stuff of dreams. But a few miles southwest of Maranello, shortly after the F12's dash displays the comforting words "electrical system failure," the scenery changes dramatically. After heading east through Castelvetro di Modena and Vignola, we turn south, tracking the rock-lined Fiume Panaro into the spine of hills that separate supercar valley from Italy's western coast. And good supercars from mere transportation.
Dynamically, you'd expect the Lamborghini to have the edge. Constructed around a central carbon monocoque, its drivetrain is longitudinal, 180 degrees from the mid-engine norm. The gearbox tucks under the center tunnel, a practice Lambo established with the Countach, to keep the car's center of mass close to its geometric middle. But the Ferrari's front-engine, rear-transaxle layout, pioneered on the 1964 275 GTB, means its 46/54 front/rear weight distribution isn't far off the Aventador's 43/57.
Worse still, the Aventador is down on power, though not by much. Both V-12s produce peak power at 8250 rpm; 700 hp in the case of the 6498-cc Lamborghini, 730 hp for the 6262-cc Ferrari. Both also output 509 lb-ft of twist, the Aventador's arriving at 5500 rpm, 500 rpm sooner than with the F12. As you'd expect, these are gut-wrenchingly rapid machines. In the best supercar tradition, this is more performance than any sane man could possibly justify in a road car.
Four-wheel-drive traction gives the Lambo a physical, but also psychological, edge off the line. An Aventador we previously tested demolished the 0-to-60 sprint in just 2.7 seconds. Ferrari loaned us an F12 on the condition that we wouldn't measure its performance, but the factory claims the car takes three seconds flat to reach the same speed. Three barely perceptible tenths from the seat; a lifetime on paper. Still, that's far from the whole story. Both these cars gallop past 100 mph in well under 10 seconds; the difference between them is epic hair-splitting. No matter how you slice it, they each offer astonishing performance and sound incredible.
Stefan JermannThe F12's engine is derived from the V-12 in Ferrari's FF, but it's fortified with an absurd 13.5:1 compression ratio and trick manifolds, the combined results giving an extra 79 hp. It delivers monster power everywhere and a shriek that feels like it could flay the skin from your bones. But that's nothing compared with the response. This thing picks up revs as if it had a nickel for a flywheel, and it slices through the seven gears of its dual-clutch transmission as if they were made of air.
That lack-of-inertia feeling pervades the F12 experience. You muscle the Aventador around, its weighty steering and stiff structure giving confidence that the Ferrari initially fails to impart. The F12's steering feels too light and quick at first, seemingly eager to embarrass you into ham-fisted corrections. But then it clicks. You relax your grip on the wheel, make more measured inputs, and learn that, despite its lightness of touch, the steering is no less talkative than the Lambo's.
Each car tells you that it has plenty of grip, but both offer a healthy serving of understeer before doing anything nasty. The difference is in how the Ferrari gives you options. With enough space, the Lambo can be coaxed into a slide, but you'd be coaxed into a rear-fastening cardigan if you tried it on the road. Choose neat, choose to live. The F12 also does neat, that razor-sharp steering dissecting mile after mile of tarmac with ruthless efficiency. Or you can do what we did and hurl the thing around like a $1500 Miata.
You tread the line between grip and slip in the Lamborghini as if you're hiking across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. In the Ferrari, you flick a steering-wheel dial from Sport to Race and keep going until you hear three little beeps signaling the stability control's retirement, as if you were dialing up an extra degree on the climate control. And while the Lamborghini's fixed-rate dampers don't have the compliance to deal with anything less than a perfectly smooth road, in the Ferrari, you can reach for the adjustable-damper button on the steering wheel and carry on at maximum attack. Time to stop? The F12's standard carbon-ceramics are easier to modulate, particularly in light braking situations. Ferrari says this fully trimmed grand tourer laps its Fiorano circuit one second quicker than the track-ready 599 GTO and two ticks sooner than its entry-level 458.
Stefan JermannRavaging these mountain roads is joyous but tiring, even from the comfort of a cabin a Miura driver could only dream about. And it's not just the driver getting hot and bothered. The cars are, too. The Ferrari might have faltered with its dashboard warnings, but the Lamborghini throws in the towel first, telling us there's a fault with its engine start/stop system. It has the stop bit nailed. Start is proving more troublesome.
By the time Lamborghini's engineers have come out and charged the battery (apparently drained by all our stops with the lights on), we're tired enough that we head back to our hotel. Both cars are nearly out of gas, and Italy's 1950s mentality toward 24-hour service stations (24 hours per week), means we cruise home as efficiently as possible. I turn the Ferrari down to Sport mode, hit the wheel-mounted button to mellow the dampers, and lope back to Modena like I'm driving a fat Mercedes. Behind me, the Lambo's xenons bounce around like lasers at a warehouse party as the car hopscotches over rough pavement.
We spend the following day where you joined us, keeping our lensman happy by prowling the streets of old Modena, the birthplace of Enzo Ferrari. The center of the old town is off-limits to regular traffic, but the police are sufficiently smitten to turn a blind eye and even pose for portraits. Photos with the Aventador, anyway. Everyone wants to know if they can have a picture with the Lamborghini. At least that's what I think they're asking, because from the driver's seat, I can't hear a thing over the radiator fans struggling to keep the V-12 cool. Forget chatting up that pretty girl in the next lane—it sounds like there's a live airboat in the rear wheel wells.
But who needs words when design can be so verbose? The Lamborghini is the modern embodiment of the 1970s supercar concept. It looks, sounds, and accelerates just the way your 12-year-old self thought a supercar should. There's an element of public service about owning an Aventador. Watching the faces of the people you pass, you become convinced that you're giving something to the community. In that sense, the F12—more usable, more engaging, more satisfying—is a selfish purchase, despite its hatchback and huge trunk. Somewhere between the two, the perfect V-12 supercar is waiting to be built.
Until that happens, our money would buy the Ferrari. Be honest with yourself about what you want from a supercar, and picking your own winner is easy.
Ferrari F12 vs. Lamborghini Aventador - Comparison Test - Road & Track

 

First Ride: 2014 Indian Chieftain

The new Indian.

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I'd rather have the rides above (LOL)
By Zach Bowman October 22, 2013 / Photos by Zach Bowman

Slideshow: 2014 Indian Chieftain First Ride


Gary Gray, product director at Indian Motorcycles, says everyone has an Indian story. That’s the kind of line that typically makes me cringe and wait for a lethal onslaught of PR nonsense. Except I fall right into that generalization.
After my grandfather got out of the Navy in the late ‘40s, he spent a summer bombing around on an old Indian. Details like the exact year or even the model are long lost, but a more crucial aspect of the tale survives: at a shave under five feet, he was too short to successfully come to a stop on the machine. My uncle, with tears of laughter in his eyes, says that my grandfather had to drop the bike every time he parked it.
Nobody said every Indian story was glamorous.
Genetics were kind to me, so I’m a foot taller than my grandfather. Looking at the 2014 Indian Chieftain, I’ve never been so glad of my comparatively long legs.
Zach BowmanA big cruiser like the Chieftain is a magical thing. Distinctly American in both its audacity and its price tag, the bike is a loping status symbol. The Thunder Stroke 111 V-twin engine dominates the motorcycle’s look and sound. Like the old Indians, the new mill is left-hand intake and right-hand drive. Designers managed to talk engineers into building the lump with parallel push-rod tubes and a faux flathead look to draw as many parallels as possible to the bikes of old. The uninitiated see a mass of billet and chrome, but for anyone familiar with what Indian once was, it works.
Parent company Polaris gave Indian, its newest acquisition, free reign to come up with a bike that was true to the brand’s heritage. Gray says that started with research. I’m not talking about poring over old ads and build sheets, either. Every soul on the design and engineering teams spent time riding a collection of vintage Indians, getting to know them and learning what made them historically important.
Zach BowmanAs a result, the new engine is a beautiful thing. Press the starter once, and the bike cranks until the engine fires, typically in about half a revolution. Then you’re shaking window panes. The sound is intoxicating; deep and mellow but distinctly V-Twin. Think Harley-Davidson, but smoother. It takes some serious throttle to induce any of the rasp and bark I traditionally associate with the big Vs. Instead, you’re left with an exhaust note that you feel in your chest long before you hear it in your helmet.
Speaking of Milwaukee’s finest, I ask Gray if Indian is directly targeting Harley’s customer base with the Chieftain.
“Buyers see them more as sister brands,” he says. “It’s not a rivalry, like you’d expect.”
Even so, Gray admits the typical Indian buyer is wealthy, older, and white: right in line with the guys and girls bringing home new Harley baggers.
Like any V-Twin, the Thunder Stroke delivers plenty of vibration, but Indian did a smart job of isolating the rider from the worst of it. That’s thanks in part to those beefy 1.25-inch handlebars. Here again, designers opted to draw a link between the new machine and its ancestors, using the same striations on the grips and running boards as found on the late ‘40s Chief. Clever details are everywhere, from the standard real-leather saddle to the full-chrome controls. The execution is gorgeous.
Zach BowmanThere’s 119.2 lb-ft of torque available from the fuel-injected engine. Polaris says that “as a matter of policy,” the company doesn’t release horsepower figures for its motorcycles or snowmobiles, nor does its major competitors.
As frustrating as that omission is, the hefty output belies the Chief’s 848-lb weight. There’s enough torque to get rolling in second gear on flat ground without riding the clutch into oblivion, and pulling yourself out of a poor gear choice is as simple as rolling on more throttle. That effortless, on-demand torque is addictive and delicious.
Ripping into the throttle is a lesson in sound, momentum, and mass. The tach swings to redline abruptly, and clicking up a gear on the six-speed transmission yields a satisfying thunk that’s so crude and charming you can’t wait for the next gear.
The Chieftain is surprisingly nimble given its weight. The suspension isn’t so soft as to compromise handling, and the Chief will hustle through complex turns with just a little convincing. There’s more lean than you’d think possible with those big, forward-control running boards, and the confident brakes make for a rewarding ride.
Polaris sees Indian as the company’s premium brand, and as such, the topped-out Chieftain comes with standard luxury features like anti-lock brakes, a power windscreen, cruise control, and keyless ignition. A proximity fob lets the owner simply throw a leg over the bike, hit the starter, and take off. The fob also locks and unlocks the gorgeous, removable panniers.
Zach BowmanAn in-dash computer serves up a bevy of information, including tire pressure, oil life, fuel economy, and range. You can also pair your smartphone audio via Bluetooth, and the stereo receives FM, AM, and weather band, all controllable via a five-way switch on the left handlebar.
The Chieftain is impressive, and like most full-dress baggers, it’s not cheap, starting at $22,999, plus destination. Throw a few options at it, and the bottom line grows quickly.
Zach BowmanIndian knows that that you can only go so far selling big-buck cruisers to deep-pocketed riders. Gray says the company doesn’t plan to stick solely to cruisers moving forward. He’s cagey about what exactly that means, but says that personally, he’d like to see modern resurrections of both the Scout and Four, complete with their more accessible price tags.
“[The cruisers] are the foundation of the brand,” Gray said. “We had to restore confidence. People had to understand that we got the brand. Indian will be able to build any type of motorcycle in the world. As we move forward, you’re going to see some pretty interesting things from Indian Motorcycles that aren’t necessarily tied to our past.”
I can’t wait to ride them.



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