Driving the Final Lamborghini Countach: There’s Still Nothing Else Like it
"If you will it, Dude, it is no dream!" So said John Goodman's character Walter Sobchak, quoting Theodor Herzl, in the Coen Brothers' classic The Big Lebowski.
The line echoed around my noggin as I drove Lamborghini Countach VIN ZA9C005A0KLA12085—the final one built—out of the Sant'Agata Bolognese factory gates. As a little boy I once saw an orange Countach parked on some gray cobblestones in Old Montreal. My father was kind enough to let me stand there, jaw on those same cobblestones, as gobsmacked as a 9-year-old human can be. Was it 10 minutes, 20, half an hour? I don't know.
I do know it was long enough that the memory helps guide my thinking, my career, my life to this day. How could such a shape, let alone on a car, exist? Moreover, how could I be standing next to it? Most crucially, how would I get myself behind that steering wheel? Because suddenly, right there and then, I had a pretty good and clear notion of what I wanted to do with my life. Whatever I'd become, cars like this Arancio Livrea-colored Lamborghini would be involved.
We can't go any further without recalling the 1987 Morley Safer 60 Minutes segment about the Countach.
Well, technically it's about the entire Lamborghini brand, but in 1987 the company was defined wholly by the mighty wedge-shaped supercar. Sorry, Jalpa fans, but you know it's true. My father was a CBS News junkie—Walter Cronkite was God, Dan Rather was the pope, and 60 Minutes the Vatican—meaning I had the episode on videotape. I've seen the piece at least 50 times. For my money, the segment is the singular greatest piece of automotive journalism extant. If you've not seen it, please pause now, Google "60 Minutes Countach," and report back. I'll wait.
Amazing, no? Great reporting and a solid 1980s overdose aside, what a magnificent machine. Three years earlier I'd seen one, and since then I'd been allowed to subscribe to the big four monthly American automotive buff books so I could go on and read all about it. But Safer's video was the first time I'd seen and heard one in action.
So imagine being a lifetime Countach enthusiast and decades later driving out of the factory behind the wheel of the last one ever made. I was freaking out. Can this be real? Is life just a dream you really can will into coming true? I should probably leave out the parts about the rain, the miserable electric seats (a later Countach development) that meant even at just 5-foot-11 my head was against the roof, no power steering and at least three turns lock to lock, an 80-pound clutch pedal, the perma-fogged windshield, the lack of noticeable brakes—essentially all the usual Countach accoutrement and mishegoss. I didn't care a lick about that list of negatives, not even an iota divided by a scintilla. I smiled for four hours straight until I had to return the car, and I kept on smiling until just about three minutes ago.
The Countach was 17 years old by the time 1990 arrived. The 25th Anniversary model was released two years earlier to celebrate the founding of the company, and rumor has it the Countach's successor, the Diablo, was supposed to make its debut that same year. However, for a variety of reasons—like its design being rejected by Lee Iacocca, CEO of Chrysler, which owned Lamborghini—the Diablo was delayed for two years.
Although I doubt the company was aware of it at the time, it had a young superstar designer on the payroll, one Horacio Pagani. It tasked him with revising the aging supercar for one last campaign. Mechanically identical to the 5000 QV, also known as Quattrovalvole, the 449-hp 5.2-liter quad-cam 48-valve V-12 was now fed via larger, more effective, and newly straked airboxes. The rear brakes were fed with straked ducts. Did Pagani make the 25th Anniversary model look too much like a Ferrari Testarossa? Perhaps. No matter, however, as that car was the bestseller among all Countaches.
I had waited a lifetime to visit Sant'Agata Bolognese. This fact surprised the people I've come to know over the years at Lamborghini. In fact, I've perhaps become too friendly, to the point the company's design boss, Mitja Borkert, once even hand-drew me an invitation to visit any time I liked. I've visited Ferrari at Maranello and toured Pagani's atelier twice, but for whatever reason I'd never made it to Lamborghini headquarters. On my most recent prototype test drive (of the new Huracán Tecnica a few months ago) with former technical boss Maurizio Regianni, I asked if it were possible to perhaps also visit the factory. "Yes, absolutely," he said. And while I was there, is there something special I'd be interested in driving?
Oh, yes.
Now, here's the thing: I've driven several Countaches. They're not very good cars. Sacrilege, but they just aren't. They're slower than you imagine, clumsy, ungainly, difficult to see out of, temperamental, and uncomfortable, the latter especially if it's hot outside. Yet the Countach somehow remains my favorite supercar. Just look at it. Still, I'm aware of the cars in the Lamborghini Museum at the factory: Miura, Espada, LM002, Diablo GT, Reventón, Sesto Elemento, and Veneno, just to name a few I'd be interested in driving. But Lamborghini exists today because of the Countach.
Yes, of course, the Miura is very pretty, and the LM002 is the Rambo Lambo, and the Diablo is rad, and all of that. But it is the insanity of the Countach, its improbability, its outrageousness, its unlikeliness, the extremism of its design, its overt thuggishness that has attracted droves of fans to the marque. The Countach specifically, and the spirit of the Countach in general, is why Chrysler bought Lamborghini, and why VW did the same about a decade later. What's this spirit entail? Just the promise that the world would be a less interesting place if Lamborghini weren't around.
So even though I had other options, it was a no-brainer to go with the last Countach. Like Safer did 35 years earlier, I'd roll through the factory gates inside of Marcello Gandini's design masterpiece. Except I'd be the one driving, not legendary Lamborghini test driver Valentino Balboni.
Years ago, I was stuck in horrific L.A. traffic with Balboni inside a Gallardo LP 550-2 Valentino Balboni Edition. We'd run out of things to say about his namesake car, so I asked him what it was like the first time he laid eyes on a Countach. "Ah, the Countach!" he said. "Impossible! Nobody believed it was a car."
He explained that when the prototypes ran around Sant'Agata's vineyard areas years before, it was like seeing a spaceship because nothing on earth looked like it. "The power! The steering! The handling! The brakes …" he trailed off, then shrugged and said, "Well, not so much the brakes," while making the sign of the cross. But his smile indicated my question had taken him to a happy place.
There's apparently only one road in the province of Modena, Italy, that the local manufacturers consider worth driving on, and I've now taken a Pagani, a Ferrari, and the final Countach there to "make photos." It's a beautiful country road that wends its way up a hill. It's minimally trafficked, and you can get up to some good fun; I almost crashed a Pagani Huayra there because I tried to do something stupid.
I nearly stuffed the final Countach there, too, because it was pouring rain and I could not see out of it. The photographer I was transporting from location to location kept laughing at the situation's absurdity. The only way I could see out of the windshield was for him to lean forward and wipe the glass with a rag. Once he was out of the vehicle, I was hosed. Everything you've ever read about how miserable and weak the Countach's HVAC system is true, yet the defroster is even worse than the A/C.
The photos, however, as you can see, are outstanding. Silver is normally a dull color for a Lamborghini, but on wet pavement with vibrant Italian greens in the background, it pops. Looking at these images now, it's easy to see how much it was worth working our way through the adverse conditions. None of it mattered, save for the part that I was driving a Lamborghini Countach around Italy. That smile I mentioned earlier was undefeatable: I even smiled when I realized I had to remove my shoes to drive it, and when it became known the Countach isn't exactly waterproof, as evidenced by my soaking-wet socks. None of it mattered.
The car, despite all its quirks, is perfect. Perfectly flawed, perfectly ridiculous, perfectly alien. Yet perfect all the same. We all collectively spend so much time these days worrying about measurements—a fraction of a second here, how much power a motor makes there. I've had people tell me they won't consider buying a certain car because it doesn't have Apple CarPlay. CarPlay? The Countach doesn't have a trunk!
Honestly, does every car need to be a Nürburgring all-star? Look at the soon-to-be-released 992 Porsche 911 GT3 RS. Yes, it looks extreme, but everything is there for a performance reason. On the Countach? The famous rear wing on most other examples actually slows the car down. Believe it or not, despite its weaknesses and probably because of them, as well, the last Countach ever made is joy on wheels.
This Countach, like all of them, is an attitude, a frame of mind, a monument to what could be and really what should be. You're just happier around it than not. Are automobiles art? Can they ever really be art? A few can, and the Countach is one of the rare ones that would bring its owner as much joy bolted to their wall as it would parked in their garage. The car is simply a rolling wow. Remember, the name comes from the word contacc, a Piedmontese interjection used when a person is shocked and astonished.
Maybe you think the car and its legend are beyond overhyped after so many years. But indeed all this time later, following all the cars, supercars, and hypercars I've been around and driven in my career, there's only one that returns me to the genesis of my infatuation. Only one that takes me back to my a priori love of automobiles, to an undoubtedly simpler and happier time.
Of course, the world today is filled with wonderful machines, but how many make you say, "Wow!" in the same tone of voice as the Countach? Not many, and even fewer cars remain a dream no matter how many times you find yourself fortunate enough to drive one.
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