Lamborghini Countach

Gandini took the wedge as far as it would go, and then Lamborghini spent sixteen years bolting things to it. The 1971 LP500 prototype was cleaner than any production car that followed: no arches, no NACA ducts, no wing. Cooling forced the side ducts and roof scoops on before production began, and the LP400 S added the arches and the optional wing that most people now think of as the shape itself. The scissor doors were a first for a production car, and they were a packaging answer rather than theatre. The sills are enormously wide and a conventional door would need more room beside the car than most streets have. The early roof carries a moulded channel for a periscope mirror, which is where the Periscopio name comes from. Horacio Pagani handled the 1988 25th Anniversary restyle, using composites for the air dam, bumpers, sills and intakes. The name is not a bull. It is the Piedmontese exclamation contacc, roughly astonishment, and it is the one break in Lamborghini's naming convention.

Almost nothing, and what exists was not the factory's idea. Lamborghini's founder had refused to go racing, and nobody who owned the company during the Countach's sixteen years had the money to change that. The one real attempt came from outside. David Jolliffe of Portman Lamborghini, the British importer, commissioned the Countach QVX in 1985: a Spice Engineering Group C chassis carrying a 5.7 litre development of the Countach V12. Tiff Needell drove it to fifth overall at the Kyalami 500 km on 23 November 1986. The project ran out of money and folded in 1987 after entries that never materialised. The other competition connection is ceremonial. A Countach served as the Formula One safety car at the Monaco Grand Prix from 1980 to 1983, which is the closest the car came to a grid. A twin-turbocharged Turbo S and the composite-bodied Evoluzione were factory experiments rather than race cars. The Evoluzione was destroyed in crash testing, and neither ever competed.

Two films did most of it. The Cannonball Run opens in June 1981 with a black LP400 S outrunning a police car, driven on screen by Adrienne Barbeau and Tara Buckman, and Lamborghini itself later marked the car's anniversary by reuniting them with it. Then The Wolf of Wall Street put a white 1989 25th Anniversary on screen and genuinely wrecked it. Two identical US-specification cars were used, one kept clean for beauty shots and one destroyed. The wreck sold at RM Sotheby's in New York on 8 December 2023 for 1,655,000 dollars, which says something about what the shape is worth even in pieces. Between and around those, the Countach did a job no other car has matched. It was the poster on the wall for two consecutive generations of children, the default drawing of a fast car, and the thing people meant when they said Lamborghini for twenty years. Almost none of them had ever seen one move.

Owning a Countach is mostly about accepting the geometry. Rearward visibility is close to nonexistent, the cabin is narrow, the pedals are offset, and the car is wide enough to make ordinary streets an exercise in judgement. None of that improves, and none of it is why people sell. Mechanically the V12 is the strong part. Classic & Sports Car reckons it good for over 100,000 miles properly maintained, with bearing wear rare, and the things to watch are misfires and oil smoke rather than anything structural. What costs money is access. The clutch requires engine removal, and neglected hydraulics shorten clutch life. Suspension joints wear quickly, which is why so many cars handle worse than they should, and the full-length cooling pipes perish with age. Rear brakes and the handbrake seize on cars that sit. The pattern is clear: a Countach that gets used is a better car than one that has been standing, and the market has started to notice.