Lamborghini Supercars With a V-12, Ranked
The Countach was not the first V12 Lamborghini, but it is the V12 Lamborghini. It was under its reign that the carmaker went from a bootstrapped operation to a global icon profiled on 60 Minutes. Most Lamborghinis are named after fighting bulls; only one is named after an exclamation that’s a borderline swear word in its native tongue. The Countach wasn’t just a car; it was a symbol.
No car has been more closely associated with a decade than the Countach is with the greed-is-good cocaine-fueled excess of the 1980s, but its story actually started almost a decade before in the early 1970s, when Lamborghini’s bigwigs gathered together and decided the aging Miura needed a replacement that would be bolder, quicker, and cure the ails of the original supercar and its backroom origins.
The prototype — designed, like the Miura, by Gandini — first appeared at the 1971 Geneva Motor Show, an impossible doorstop of a spaceship with a roofline that barely came up to the waists of the go-go-boot-wearing models who posed alongside it. It was pure art, to the point that it lacked many of the features a production car would need, such as mirrors, bumpers, etc. Lamborghini would spend the next three years workshopping the Countach to get it ready for market, but while many of the prototype’s fanciful pieces would be tweaked, the scissor doors remained and would go on to become as much a defining trait of Lamborghini’s V12 models (and the supercar class as a whole) as the low-slung mid-engined body style.
The Countach launched with the same 3.9-liter V12 as the Miura had used, now tuned up to 370 hp and, more notably, rotated to a more traditional longitudinal layout. In 1978, the car actually lost 25 hp, but it gained the option of a rear spoiler — a look which would largely become identified with the car in the public eye. The drop in ponies was temporary: the engine was restored to 370 hp when it grew to 4.8 liters in 1982, and then grew again to 5.2 liters and 449 hp in 1985, although emissions rules meant Americans had to live with “just” 420.
Although it stayed in showrooms for 16 years — long enough to learn to drive itself — a little less than 2,000 examples of the Countach were built, but those small number of examples arrived at just the right moment: at the peak of the cultural and socioeconomic influence of the baby boomer generation, and exactly when to ensnare the hearts and souls of the budding Ten X that would define the years to come. The supercar as we know it, the hypercar as we know it, the sports car as we know it would not exist without the Countach.
