Lamborghini Gallardo

The shape began as an Italdesign proposal from Fabrizio Giugiaro and was finished in-house by Luc Donckerwolke, who had run Lamborghini design since 1998. What he did was take the Countach's language, hard creases, flat planes, a wedge with no curves anywhere in it, and shrink it without softening it. There is almost no radius on the car. That discipline is what makes it read as a Lamborghini at a glance despite being the small one. The hexagonal theme runs through the side intakes, the wheels and the tail lights. The rear deck is a flat glass shelf over the engine. There are no scissor doors, and there never were: those stayed with the V12 cars. Walter de Silva reworked it for the 2008 LP 560-4 and the changes are all at the ends. The nose gains Y-shaped daytime running lights and sharper intake blades, the tail a wider diffuser, and the whole car looks considerably angrier for very little actual change. The Superleggera versions add visible carbon, drop the ride height and take weight out of everything you touch.

Lamborghini spent forty years refusing to go racing, and the Gallardo is where that ends. In 2009 the factory launched the Lamborghini Blancpain Super Trofeo, a one-make series built around a stripped 570 hp Gallardo LP 560-4 at roughly 1,300 kg, running European weekends alongside FIA GT, the DTM and the WTCC. It was marketed as the fastest one-make series in the world and it was the only one running four-wheel drive. It is also the direct ancestor of everything Squadra Corse does now, including the Huracán Super Trofeo and the STO and STJ road cars that borrow its name. The customer racing came from outside. Reiter Engineering in Bavaria built the Gallardo GT3 privately before Lamborghini formally contracted them, then developed three further cars between 2011 and 2013. Reiter Gallardos made Lamborghini the most successful marque in the ADAC GT Masters, with 21 wins from 2007, including nine from twelve races and both titles in the series' first season with Christopher Haase. Gallardos also ran in FIA GT3, Super GT, the American Le Mans Series and Speed World Challenge.

The Gallardo's most durable public role is the least likely one. In December 2004 Lamborghini gave two of them to the Polizia di Stato for the force's 152nd anniversary, and the Polizia Stradale put them to work on the Salerno to Reggio Calabria motorway, largely carrying donor organs to transplant surgeons. That partnership is now more than twenty years old and has run over two hundred organ-transport missions, with an LP 560-4 replacing the early cars and two Huracáns following in 2014 and 2017. A police supercar that spends its life delivering transplant organs is a better story than any film role. Two more went to London's Metropolitan Police for a brief period in 2005 and 2006, and one ended up in Panamanian police service after being seized. Beyond that, the Gallardo is the Lamborghini of the video-game generation, the shape that turns up in everything from Gran Turismo onward and the one a lot of people under forty picture when someone says Lamborghini. It never had the Countach's poster, but it had the controller.

A Gallardo is a far more ordinary car to live with than its shape suggests, and the things that go wrong are a short, well-known list. The clutch is first, and it is a consumable rather than a fault: e-gear cars go through them, and how fast depends entirely on whether the previous owner crawled it through cities or drove it properly. Budget for one and be pleasantly surprised if you never need it. The e-gear hydraulics are the item that hurts. A failed actuator is a serious bill, and the warning is usually slurred or slow shifts rather than a sudden stop. Exhaust valves seize on cars that sit. Catalytic converters degrade. Coil packs fail and light the dash. Suspension bushes and dampers wear out at ordinary road-car mileages and are ordinary road-car jobs. What is absent matters more than what is present. There is no rust, no fragile engine, no structural mystery and no shortage of independent specialists who know the car inside out. The V10 is genuinely long-lived, and plenty have covered serious distance.