The risky thing about making any reboot is getting it wrong – screwing it up so badly that you tarnish what everybody remembers they love about the original.
And so to the Lamborghini Countach. A car whose name in Italian roughly translates as ‘crikey, look at that!’, and quite rightly.
The original Countach of 1974, Lamborghini’s second mid-engined supercar, was one of the defining cars of the late 20th century. If you had been asked in the ’70s, ’80s or even ’90s to describe what a supercar was, you would have been explaining rakish looks, latent aggression, a low roof, that the engine was probably in the middle and had at least eight but probably 12 cylinders and that the top speed started with a two or T thereabouts. You would have been describing a Countach.
So famous is it that as recently as last year, one was inducted into America’s National Historic Vehicle Register, effectively a Hall of Fame for vehicles that define America, which includes only 30 cars. Specifically, it was Countach chassis number 1121112, a 1979 LP400S in black with spoilers front and rear, as used in the film The Cannonball Run. Starring Burt Reynolds and anyone else who was famous in 1981, it was a fictional story but inspired by real events, illegal 1970s races “from sea to shining sea”, from the east of the US to the west.
