HIGHLAND BULLS
THE THRILL OF STANDING AND STARING HAS ITS place, but here at evo we don’t often critique the styling of cars. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so we only occasionally offer an opinion, often based on us being among the first to see a new car ‘in the metal’. That doesn’t quite work here though, because the Lamborghini Countach LPI 800-4 exists as an homage to the original Countach LP400, revealed as a concept to a gob-smacked world at the Geneva motor show in 1971.
The new Countach was created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that event and was revealed as a limited-run production car at Pebble Beach last August. It’s fair to say that Marcello Gandini, who styled the original Countach for Lamborghini when working at Bertone, wasn’t a fan. ‘I have built my identity as a designer, especially when working on supercars for Lamborghini, on a unique concept,’ he declared. ‘Each new model I would work on would be an innovation, a breaker, something completely different from the previous one.’ The LPI 800-4 is anything but forward-looking, of course.
I’m fortunate to have driven and spent time with an original Countach LP400 and it was an incredible experience. It was yellow and for sale for £40k, but that was in 1993 and I didn’t earn half that annually. As a kid in the early ’70s, I idolised the black-and-white profile shot of the Countach in my Observer’s Book of Automobiles. It looked like the future back then and it still looks sensational five decades later.
Personally, I think it’s especially difficult to produce modern interpretations of cars built before low-profile tyres were introduced – their balloon-like tyres and tiny wheels are an integral part of the look. That’s certainly the case with the original Countach. The idea of a
