FRANKFURT 2009: Lamborghini Reventon Roadster

If you're the flint-hearted pragmatist type you'll wave it away as an expensive irrelevance. And you could accuse the Reventon Roadster of being nothing more than a Murcielago drop-top in drag, but what a dress it wears and no other road car at the show got the juices flowing like this big, bad bull.

Less than 20 will be made, and you'll have to fork out somewhere in the region of $2.2 million for the privilege, but you'll be buying a car of rare presence. You'll also have front row tickets to the open air theatre that is its mighty V12 engine. The all-paw Reventon Roadster borrows the Murcielago LP670-4 SV's 6.5-litre V12, so it's good for 0-100km/h in a claimed 3.4sec and you'll have 493kW of wailing, snarling, gnashing ecstasy sitting just centimetres behind you. The sonic onslaught should almost be worth the price of admission alone.

Elsewhere, the matt-grey, fighter-jet inspired bodywork is all sharp creases, wide hips and tarmac-scraping stance for a car dripping with visual aggression. Have I mentioned that I like this car yet?
Bar the doors, the entire body is fashioned from carbonfibre and keeps kerbweight to an acceptable, if not exactly lithe, 1690kg.

The instrument cowling is milled from aluminium and every other surface is swathed in lightweight Alcantara. For those lucky few with pockets deeper than the Atlantic, the Reventon Roadster is on sale from next month. Lucky bastards...