Driving the
Countach is not so much driving as wrestling
Those power figures are as optimistic as thoughts of using
the Miura as a daily driver, but there’s no doubt that this was serious
performance by late ’60s standards. For the P400S that arrived in 1968,
enlarged ports and modified combustion chambers pumped that to 370bhp, but it’s
the SV that’s the ultimate Miura.
An awful lot of
cars have been designed since this. How come none of them looks as good?
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 60-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
175mph.
Lamborghini
Countach Engine
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.
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 La Ferrari. 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.
Miura’s oddly
raked steering wheel is surprisingly light. Brakes are unsurprisingly awful
At the same 1971 Geneva salon that Lamborghini unveiled the
SV, the ultimate Miura, the public also got its first peek at the Countach. The
two cars couldn’t have looked more different, the 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 un-coincidentally, 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.
