From Italy With Love (Part 2)
In the 1960s, with the advent of the
Miura, Lamborghini invented the supercar. In the ’70s they invented it all over
again with the Countach. Will anything ever diminish their charms?
Unveiled at Geneva in March of 1971, this
was a much tougher Miura, shorn of its girly eyelashes and sporting bulbous
rear arches covering fat 6o-section tyres. Larger inlet valves, revised cam
timing and bigger jets for the quartet of downdraft Webers separated from your
ears by a simple sheet of Perspex, lifted power to a reputed 385bhp, and the
top speed to more than i75mph.
The Miura doesn’t feel supercar fast by
modern standards, but it certainly sounds it. Lamborghini’s first mid-engined
car might have been designed with the road, and not racing in mind, but for all
its smart leather trim and electric window switches, the cockpit is hot and
noisy, the heady aroma of unburnt fuel only adding to your giddiness as the
carbs spit and growl behind your head.
The
Miura doesn’t feel supercar fast by modern standards, but it certainly sounds
it
As a driving experience, it’s full of
surprises, good and bad. Thin pillars, a low scuttle, and narrow hips make it a
cinch to place on the road; even the rear visibility isn’t bad. But the control
weights are all over the place. The steering wheel, angled upwards like some
kind of motobility easy ingress feature, is pleasantly light and full of feel,
but the four-wheel disc brakes need a big push and flattening the throttle
pedal demands the quads of an Olympic squat-lifter.
It’s an intensely physical experience,
massively flawed, if we’re honest, and to those of us weaned on modern
supercars, the Miura is a difficult car to drive fast and drive well at the
same time. Even independently, come to that, but it doesn’t make us want one
any less. Forget thrashing it around like a 458, or even LaFerrari. But the
sensation of nailing that shift, of clipping that apex at even six-tenths pace,
is one hundred times more satisfying than pulling off a push-button
launch-control start in a modern supercar. Can you imagine what it must have
felt like to drive a three-miles-a-minute car when half the vehicles on the
road struggled to break the speed limit? No doubt about it, the Miura must have
seemed otherworldly in its day. But something was about to make it look about
as modern as Karl Benz’s trike.
At the same 1971 Geneva salon that
Lamborghini unveiled Miura all soft curves and simmering tension, the summation
of all we knew about conventional car beauty; the Countach a brutalist
expression of a brave new world of car design, as controversially shocking,
with its slash-cut arches and pill-box glasshouse, as any example of the swathe
of stark concrete structures then being erected around the world.
It didn’t matter that we’d seen the crisp
angular design before, its pinched chisel nose and pop-up lights, or even those
incredible vertically opening scissor doors, on the Alfa Stradale-based Carabo
concept of 1968, also designed uncoincidentally, by Marcello Gandini for
Bertone. The Countach was where it was at in 1971, and was about as unlike
Ferrari’s handsome but oh-so conventional 365 GTB/4 Daytona as it was possible
to get. Little wonder the name, a local Piedmontese expression, Countach,
reputedly comes from an utterance of astonishment normally expelled at the
sight of a beautiful woman. ‘Hook ’em out, love’ doesn’t have quite the same
ring to it.
The
Countach was where it was at in 1971, and was about as unlike Ferrari’s handsome
but oh-so conventional 365 GTB/4 Daytona as it was possible to get.
The Countach didn’t just look different to
the Miura. It was radically new under the skin too. Instead of the Miura’s
box-section chassis, the Countach was built around a tubular steel spaceframe.
And while the V12 was retained, it was mounted longitudinally, instead of
transversely. But unlike most mid-engined cars, from the GT40 to the 458, which
have the gearbox mounted behind the engine, acting directly on the rear wheels,
the Countach’s entire drivetrain was turned through 180 degrees, like a 911
that’d been shunted up the backside by an HGV.
The
Countach didn’t just look different to the Miura. It was radically new under
the skin too. Instead of the Miura’s box-section chassis, the Countach was
built around a tubular steel spaceframe.
