CANNONBALL!
Forget the serious stuff. If you search online for the best ten movies ever, you can be sure it won’t show up. It’s not even top 100. But, if you are reading this, it’s most likely that you love cars. And you’ll know that when The Cannonball Run appeared in June 1981 it set a new standard for a Hollywood movie about cars. The plot is funny, sometimes almost surreal, and the cast is stellar: Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Jackie Chan, Dean Martin… But what really makes the difference between this and every other car movie is the number of cars involved, and the desirability of those cars.
As in The Italian Job, the opening scene is iconic – and it depicts a Lamborghini. But being 12 years younger, instead of the rounded shape of an orange Miura P400, The Cannonball Run focuses on a sharp, double-winged, black Countach LP 400 S. The 3min 26sec of the opening scene, with the 12-cylinder downdraught carburettor soundtrack accompanying it, is so ingrained in automotive legend that many Countach owners (both of the period and even today!) have admitted that they got the Lamborghini bug from watching it.
In the movie, a stretch of tarmac just south-east of Las Vegas, linking
