Arrivederci, raging bull: this is the last ever Lamborghini Aventador

If life is a Lamborghini Aventador, then the mad king’s lament from That Scottish Play rings true. It has strut and fret its hour upon the stage, and it will soon be heard no more.

Because that sky blue supercar in the gallery below is the last ever Lamborghini Aventador. There’s been lots of talk about the replacement to a car that takes its name, like all good Lambos, after a particularly famous bull. And yet it has become so inextricably linked to Sant’Agata’s modern success – outselling the sum total of all of its previous V12 cars, 11,465 – that its follow-up has big shoes to fill.

Hybrid shoes, if the analogy isn’t too weird. The exiting Aventador takes with it the last ever free-breathing V12 the company will ever build before an electrified powerplant arrives, and you may well work up your own lament to that. “The V12 engine has been part of Lamborghini’s heritage since the company’s earliest days,” explains boss Stephan Winkelmann, “the beating heart of models from Miura to Diablo, Countach to Murcielago.”

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Indeed, it was following the Murcielago’s curtain call that the Aventador stepped onto the stage. Unveiled in another dimension commonly known as ‘2011’, the LP 700-4 – longitudinally positioned rear engine, 700 metric horsepower, four-wheel-drive – packed a brand new 6.5-litre V12 that, barring a few changes over the years, survived to this day.

Lamborghini explains the Aventador was a ‘clean-sheet’ car, taking nothing from before other than the notion that, like the Bard’s aforementioned protagonist, it was mad. That ISR gearbox certainly fitted the brief, along with the carbon-fibre monocoque clothed in “complex surfaces” and every angle known to mathematics. With the famous scissor-opening doors, the V12 Aventador was not short of visual drama.

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Though owners thought otherwise, with apparently 85 per cent of Aventadors featuring some level of customisation. Lamborghini tells us more than 200 bespoke trims and colours have been cooked up by its Ad Personam department in pursuit of that last tenth of visual madness.

Roadster followed Coupe. Super Veloce trumped them all for a while, featuring more power, more aero, less weight and a Nürburgring time (and video) that cemented the big Lambo’s credentials.

Though, that was just a starter, because the Aventador SVJ improved that ‘Ring time and packed the-then most powerful iteration of the 6.5-litre V12. An even more powerful version sits at the heart of this last car, the 780-4 ‘Ultimae’, which is basically a Greatest Hits of Aventador all rolled into one sold-out package.