Lamborghini Diablo

The Diablo is Gandini's design and it is not, which is the most interesting thing about it. He drew a sharp, hard-edged successor to the Countach in the same language he had used for twenty years. Chrysler, which had owned the company since 1987, decided it was too extreme and had Tom Gale's team at the Chrysler Styling Center round the edges and smooth the surfaces into what reached production in 1990. Gandini disliked the result enough to leave the project, then took his rejected design to the engineer Claudio Zampolli and turned it into the Cizeta-Moroder V16T, of which about ten were built. That car is the physical record of what the Diablo was supposed to look like, and comparing the two is the clearest illustration anywhere of what an American corporate styling department did to an Italian wedge. The scissor doors carried over. The 1999 facelift replaced the pop-up headlamps with fixed composite lenses licensed from Nissan and fitted a wave-shaped dashboard. The name is a bull bred by the Duke of Veragua, famous for a fight in Madrid in July 1869.

The Diablo is where Lamborghini finally built a race car, thirty-three years after the company was founded. The SV-R, announced at Geneva in 1996, was the factory's first purpose-developed competition car. 31 were built, and they ran in the Philippe Charriol Super Sport Trophy, a one-make series Lamborghini created for them and ran from 1996 to 1999. The GTR replaced it, announced at Bologna in 1999 and built in 40 examples with more power and revised handling, running the Lamborghini GTR Supertrophy through to 2002. That is the whole record, and its shape matters. Both cars raced only against each other. Lamborghini created a series rather than entering one, which meant no championship results, no rivals from other marques and no development pressure from outside. Ferruccio's refusal to go racing had been company policy for three decades, and when it was finally relaxed what emerged was a customer racing programme rather than a works assault. Sant'Agata did not contest a world championship until well into the Audi era.

The Diablo owned the 1990s bedroom wall the way the Countach owned the 1980s, and it did it partly through screens rather than paper. It was one of the eight cars in the original Need for Speed in 1994, which for a generation of children was the first time a Lamborghini did anything other than sit still on a poster, and it kept appearing in racing games for the rest of the decade. The poster trade did the rest. Yellow was the colour that sold, and by the middle of the decade the images were everywhere, printed in enormous numbers by Trends International and others. What has changed is who it belongs to. For a long time the Diablo was the awkward middle child, too new to be a classic and too old to be current, sitting between the Countach's mythology and the Murciélago's modernity. The children who had it on the wall are the people bidding on them now, and the market has responded exactly as you would expect.

By the standards of the rest of this family, the Diablo is straightforward. Composite panels over a steel frame means corrosion is a secondary concern rather than the main event, and the later Audi-era cars are properly screwed together in a way the earliest ones are not. The ergonomics are the daily reality. Visibility is poor, the car is very wide, the pedals sit offset, and an early car without power steering asks for real effort at low speed. Heat management in traffic is a known theme with a mid-mounted V12 under glass. Mechanically, plan around the clutch and around access. The engine comes out for major work, and that single fact sets the cost of most jobs. Early cars run engine management that fewer specialists genuinely know than say they do, so diagnostic history is worth reading closely. Cars that have sat are the ones to be careful with. A Diablo used regularly tends to be the sound one, which is a good excuse to use it.