Bull Re-run

How to put the new Lamborghini Countach into context? Drive it together with the original which, for many, is still the defining supercar

- James Taylor

LIKE ALL THE BEST STORIES, THERE IS more than one version and no one can quite agree which one is true. The most popular version of how the Lamborghini Countach got its name is that a technician saw the original show car for the first time in all its impossibly low, impossibly wide origami glory as it was being hurriedly prepped for its début at the 1971 Geneva Motor Show and blurted Countach!’ It is an exclamation in the local Piedmontese dialect for which there is no direct translation in English. The Lamborghini Cor Blimey” would not really have the same ring to it.

True or not, the new supercar codenamed LPso0o did not yet have a name and this one stuck. And it is a great name. Countach! And now the name is back on the Aventador-based Countach LPI 800-4. Only 112 will be built, at 1.7 million Rs 15.65 crore) apiece, and all are sold.

Seeing both of these cars together for the first time, Countach” is as good an exclamation as any. As the scissor doors on both cars are lofted upwards, beckoning us to go for a drive, the English language is falling a bit short at this moment.

The red car is not just any Countach; it is a 5000 Quattrovalvole from 1988, considered by Countach 6 6 cognoscenti to be the ultimate of its kind: the optimum blend of power with 455 hp from its 5.2-litre Viz), handling with huge Pirelli P7s under the wraparound arches), and style with less fussy design than the Anniversario that rounded out the latter parts of the Countach’s 14-year production run). Only 15 right-hand-drive QVs were built, this car’s owners Tadek and Verna Lipinski tell me, and only 12 remain.

If the show car that inspired that original expletive was strikingly pure, this QV is the Countach at its most hedonistic, with those wide arches, telephone-dial wheels, and famously un-aerodynamic rear wing all present.