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I'm certainly not unique in having had posters of Lamborghini Countaches on my walls when I was a kid. I'd probably still have at least one around, if I hand't lost a bunch when got some water in our basement in 2005.
The design is frankly kind of crude. It has very little aesthetic sense whatsoever. The body is all flat panels; like the designer started with clay base and then whacked off facets witha matchete. It's a bit like a formula-1 car stretched sideways sot hat it has two seats.
I've had a re-surgence of interest in high-end cars in the last few years, watching Top Gearon BBC TV, where they drive those types of cars all the time. Interestingly, a lot of their take on the Coutach as a car to own is negative. Jeremy Clarkson is the mouth of Top Gear (he's described himself as the "bombastic one" among the hosts. Interestingly, he's written an editorial on why NOT to buy a supercar at all; that it won't improve your love life, and so on, which is very interesting for someone in that business. His article includes this:
This is because, when you are in a supercar, you can resist stabbing the loud pedal for very long periods of time but eventually, you'll think, "Hang on. This bit of road looks appropriate, I'll open the taps." And that's a mistake, because no road is appropriate really for the savagery that results. Quickly, then, you will soil yourself.There's also a segment of Top Gear in which Jeremy basically lays it out that the Countach "was never a good car" at all.
And I know all that. And I probably wouldn't like driving one
anyway. And given that only slightly over 2000 were ever made, and
they still sell for not less than $120,000, and insuring one is
astronomical, there's no way I'd ever be able to afford one. And yet,
I still find them compelling. I bought a couple of books on them
recently, because I was buying stuff on Amazon.
The cover picture is the LP500 prototype, of which only one was ever
made. It's a fairly photogenic car if you like that sort of thing:
Now many years later, what this book has pictures of that I haven't
ever seen is the incredibly integreated drivetrain:
It's technically a "mid-engined" car, which means that the engine is
between the transmission and the final drive. I'd alwyas imagined
(and drawn) that the transmission had a piece that stuck out to the
side and the drive shaft ran back beside the engine. Well that's not
the case; the transmission/engine oil pan has a passage at the bottom
for the drive shaft to pass through. This means that the
transmission/engine/final drive system must be removed from the car as
one massive piece, with special jigs, rather than being able to remove
and work on one of the three in isolation.
Coming full circle--the REAL reason that the Counatch is part of the furniture of my mind is less because of the car itself, and more than it was in a bad 1980s TV show called Automan. The show was sort of a reversal of (and ripoff of) the ideas of TRON; a computer character comes into the world (and fights crimes and solves mysteries and the usual stuff). In addition to Automan himself, he had a "cursor" that could create physical objects, including vehicles. Vehicles that weren't specifically desguised to make them look "real" were basically physical wire-frame models. The (cursor-created) car that Automan drove was a Lamborghini Countach LP400 with the wire-frame treatment. The car was super-powered, and could make instant 90-degree turns at any speed; a standard gag was to show the interior of the car during these turns, which didn't effect Automan at all but the human occupant got slammed sideways.