Lamborghini is bringing back the Countach
Wednesday, 11 August 2021
Lamborghini has officially confirmed that its next supercar will be a reboot of possibly the most iconic poster car of them all – the Countach.
It sounds like a joke, but it's genuine. Lamborghini announced the news on its social media channels, along with a dedicated Countach page on its website that only says “Future is our legacy. And the new Lamborghini Countach is coming. Stay tuned…”
That's literally all it says, with no mention of power or any other technical specs. However, we already know Lamborghini is working on a new electrified V12 engine, so the reborn Countach could be the first to debut the new powertrain.
Whether it’s a plug-in hybrid or some other form of electrification remains to be seen, but it probably won’t be the supercapacitor system seen in the Sian.
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In fact, a photo has already been leaked to Instagram from the customer-only Unica app that confirms the car’s full name will be the Countach LPI 800-4. That means an output of roughly 800hp (596kW) and all-wheel drive.
Aside from a wedge-shaped body, we know absolutely nothing about what the car will look like. In any case, there will be a plethora of vents and intakes, as evidenced by another image on Unica.
The new Countach should debut in full in the next few days during Monterey Car Week, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the original model, so we’ll know more shortly. Apparently, just 112 units will be built. Expect each build slot to cost well over the million-dollar mark.
The original Countach launched in 1974, following a debut as the LP500 concept at the 1971 Geneva motor show, and was the replacement for the Miura. It’s radical wedge styling would se the template for supercar design for decades to come, and it stayed in production for 16 years, with Lamborghini building 1,983 in that time.
Rather than being associated with bulls or bullfighting like most Lamborghinis before and since, the Countach name originated from the word “contacc”, an exclamation of astonishment or surprise in the Piedmontese language.
“There was a profiler working with us who made the locks. He was two meters tall with two enormous hands, and he performed all the little jobs. He spoke almost only Piedmontese, didn’t even speak Italian,” said Countach designer Marcello Gandini, in an article released by the company about the origins of the car’s name.
“Piedmontese is much different from Italian and sounds like French. One of his most frequent exclamations was ‘countach’, which literally means plague, contagion, and is actually used more to express amazement or even admiration.
“So jokingly I asked Bob Wallace (Lamborghini’s Kiwi test driver and engineer) how it sounded to an Anglo-Saxon ear. He said it in his own way, strangely. It worked. We immediately came up with the writing and stuck it on. But maybe the real suggestion was the idea of one of my co-workers, a young man who said let’s call it that. That is how the name was coined. This is the only true story behind this word.”