“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
