Lamborghini Countach 5000 at Greenwich Concurs show 2021
Design and development:
The development of the Countach was initiated by Ferruccio Lamborghini with the goal of creating a successor to the Miura. The Miura was widely acclaimed after its introduction in 1966, but by 1970 new competitors including the Ferrari Daytona had been introduced to the market, and the Miura was showing its age. Chief engineer Paolo Stanzani and his staff began work on the Miura successor in 1970 under the project name "LP112." From the beginning of the project, Stanzani's collaborators included test driver Bob Wallace, assistant engineer Massimo Parenti and designer Marcello Gandini of Bertone.
Stanzani and Ferruccio Lamborghini agreed that the Miura's successor required a mechanical design that enabled the greatest possible performance as well as a body that was both aerodynamically efficient and aesthetically daring. These principles had formed the Miura's development and enabled the commercial success of that model. Despite Mr. Lamborghini's preference for comfortable grand tourers, he recognized the commercial value of a more uncompromising sports car like the Miura and gave Stanzani's team permission to further push boundaries with the LP112 project. The resulting Countach incorporated successful aspects of the Miura, such as the rear mid-engine, rear wheel drive layout along with many new engineering and styling innovations. Lamborghini's engineering team addressed several flaws in the Miura design, improving high-speed stability and reducing lift-off oversteer as well as addressing the limited maintenance access, uneven weight distribution and cooling issues endemic to the Miura's transverse engine layout.
After a year of intensive development work, the first Countach prototype, designated LP500, was shown to the public at the 1971 Geneva Motor Show. Subsequently, the Lamborghini engineering team spent three years refining this radical prototype into the production-ready LP400 Countach, which debuted in 1974.
Name
The Countach name originated in late 1970 or 1971, near the beginning of the LP112 project. Most previous and subsequent Lamborghini car names are associated with famous bulls and bullfighting, but the Countach broke with this tradition. The name originated from the word contacc (pronounced [kʊŋˈtɑtʃ]), an exclamation of astonishment in the Piedmontese language.
Marcello Gandini, the designer of the Countach, explained the origin of the name:
When we made cars for the car shows, we worked at night and we were all tired, so we would joke around to keep our morale up. 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. 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, like ‘goodness’. He had this habit.
When we were working at night, to keep our morale up, there was a jousting spirit, so I said we could call it Countach, just as a joke, to say an exaggerated quip, without any conviction. There nearby was Bob Wallace, who assembled the mechanics—we always made the cars operational. At that time you could even roll into the car shows with the car running, which was marvelous.
So jokingly I asked Bob Wallace 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.
— Marcello Gandini, Not Just Bulls: the Creator Tells Us the Story Behind the Name Countach
Lamborghini used a system of alphanumeric designations in order to further delineate Countach models. This designation begins with "LP", an abbreviation of the Italian "longitudinale posteriore," meaning "longitudinal rear." This refers to the engine orientation and placement shared by all Countach models. For the prototype and early production models, "LP" was followed by a three digit number designating nominal engine displacement, "400" for 3.9-litre engines and "500" for 4.8 and 5-litre engines. Therefore, the full name of the first production Countach was the Lamborghini Countach LP400. As in the Miura, the letter "S" (short for Sport) was added for later high performance variants. This naming scheme was disrupted by the 1985 LP5000 Quattrovalvole equipped with a 5.2-litre engine, also called the 5000QV. The LP- designation was dropped entirely for the 1988 25th Anniversary Edition, also called the Anniversary
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