^^^
What's the obscene translation?

It has no direct translation into English but it's maybe a little cruder than "holy cow"... Maybe the best way to say it would be it's somewhere along the road from "holy cow" to "Holy Shi*!" and you will notice that I have added an exclamation point.

It's part of the Piedmontese dialect from northern Italy and I doubt Google Translate has ever heard of it.

JR

Apparently, according to what my ex Italian g/f said, it's the exclamation expressed by the designer when he first viewed the prototype...along the lines of "Wow!"
She sold exotic cars in San Francisco for 12 years.

There's a handful of stories about the origin of the name, like most stories about Lamborghini. That's one of them. I once spent a day hanging out with Bob Wallace and we discussed all sorts of crap, including the Countach. I don't recall what he had to say about it, as it's been a long time and my memory isn't what it was. The one thing I do recall him telling me about the Countach was not to buy one, which I ignored. I got what he was saying but it was a good thing financially for me to buy one, so, sorry Bob...

JR

^^^
I'd (we'd) love to hear some stories about your experience as an owner.
Feel free.

Part 1, of several
 

Ahh, where to begin...

I first became aware of Lamborghini in 1969. I was living in Singapore with the rest of the family and we spent all day each Sunday at the Singapore Island Country Club. Lots of rich people in Singapore in those days and there were more than a few of them that would show up to the club in a Ferrari, or Lamborghini, or other assorted displays of wealth. Some of these guys would also exercise them at night, howling down a road that followed a drainage canal that bisected the island.

So, when the family took a trip to Europe in around 1970, one of the things I put on the to-do list was a visit to the Ferrari factory. Our visit coincided with the annual European holiday month of August, so Ferrari had shut down for the duration. We arrived at the factory, my father announced that we wanted a tour, and whoever manned the gate basically said, eh, you go **** off. Okay...

Lamborghini wasn't all that far away, so we piled back into the van and headed northeast. 45 minutes or an hour later we arrived at the Lamborghini factory gate, my father did his thing and the guy at the gate said, sure, no problem. The factory door is over there, do whatever you want... So we did. If you've ever seen photos of the factory in those days, you'll note that it had been designed with a lot of windows, so even shut down it was easy to see our way around. For my money, that was the highlight of the trip, so when I got back, I started studying cars, and in particular Lamborghinis, in more detail.

As I finished school in the 1970's I collected every magazine and book I could get my hands on and many of those features the Countach. I studied everything ever written about it in English and looked at the pictures of those books that I couldn't read and I compared it to the race cars that I had also spent 10 years studying. I concluded that it was the ultimate car, not because it was wild-looking, or the most expensive car that you could buy, but because it made the most sense from a technical point of view. If you wanted to design a car to get two people from one point to another in the shortest time possible, this was it. And there were always two people, as every Lambo driver also had a mistress...

Continued...

You may be on to something there
 

seconda parte
 

I drove a Corvette while in college and one day some dickhead keyed the paint on every panel on the car. So, I found the ultimate fiberglass guru and he proceeded to re-manufacture the body. As it turned out, Corvettes were somewhat poorly slapped together and this guy could fix it. What started out as a complete repaint led to a show worthy finish on a body nicer than anything Chevrolet thought possible. In the meantime, I drove my girlfriend's VW bug, which had a four-speed. This was fun, so when the opportunity arose to get my hands on her mother's Ford Courier (Mazda) pickup, I jumped at the chance. After all, it had a 5 speed and little or no weight on the rear wheels.

By the time I got the Vette back, I was of the opinion that I needed something with a manual gearbox, so I hit the car dealerships. I drove all sorts of crap and, the day of my graduation, I stopped by the local Ferrari dealer and test drove the one car they had in their inventory. This happened to be a US spec fuel-injected 308 GTS, which remains to this day one of the sorriest cars I've ever driven. Magnum PI be damned, these things were expensive piles of ****. So, I kept the Vette. For a little while...

Further research indicated that a Porsche 911 would be a good thing, so off went the Vette and, one Friday afternoon, into an airplane I went, with every pocket in my suit filled with packs of $100 bills. 53 minutes later I landed in Dallas, my brother picked my up and about an hour later I was the proud owner of a 911SC targa. For those of you wondering what this has to do with a Lamborghini, hang with me a minute...

I enjoyed the 911 thoroughly, as it was my first proper car, and it sent me off the deep end into the sports car world. Dallas had, at the time, a bookstore devoted soley to the automobile, so I made regular pilgrimages down there and bought every book I could lay my hands on. Given that I probably had 5,000 volumes in my library at one point, and around 4,000 magazines, I became well-read on everything with 2 wheels, or 4. As my education progressed, I decided a coupe would be much better than a targa, so in 1982, I ordered a new 911SC coupe. that got picked up in Europe, so I had a second opportunity to see what cars were available in Europe that we seldom saw in the US. That gave me my first opportunity to study a Countach up close and personal. At that point there were few in the US, as that was the height of the grey market and you had to really throw the dice to try and get something like that in the US. Many tried, a few succeeded, others failed miserably.

About 1986, I decided that I needed a faster car, and it was getting expensive to modify the 911, so I started looking around. My choice came down to two cars. Option 1 was a new 930. Option 2 was a used Miura SV. Both were around $50k. They were about equally fast. After much pondering, I picked the 930, as I'd become fond of the build quality of a Porsche, the Lambo was known to randomly catch fire and it wasn't really legal, anyway. Having been around when one of the first Ferrari Boxers in the US got impounded by Customs (local car nut Toly Aratunoff, after he foolishly let C&D write a magazine article about it) I wimped out and bought the 930. Safer, and it had a warranty. I should point out that I had also looked at another Ferrari, a 328 GTS. Although better and faster than the 308, it was still a GTS and so, still a colossal pile of ****. Not too mention, slower and more expensive than the 930. I enjoyed the 930 but the Lambo itch was getting more bothersome.

Fast forward a few years and I decided I really needed a 12 cylinder Italian something or another. I tracked down Bob Wallace at his shop in Phoenix and we spent the day discussing cars and what he'd been up to since leaving Lamborghini. He was making a living working on all sorts of exotics, along with rebuilding all sorts of old race motors. At that point I think he was pretty annoyed with Lamborghini, partly because he never really got to develop any of the cars sufficiently, before the rich guys started throwing wads of cash at Ferruccio and out the door the cars went, ready or not. So, his advice was to skip the Countach, even though that was really his baby, and buy a Ferrari. I still considered both of them, called on any number of cars, but in the end I flew to California and bought a Testarossa. It was built far better than a 308/328, which felt more like a nice-smelling kit car, and it was fast. Really fast... By this time, I'd been in the Ferrari Club a while (I'd previously bought a 328 GTB, after all, having finally found one that I could drive and figuring out that by not have a large hole in the roof, it actually wasn't half bad - not at all like a GTS) and the TR and I covered a lot of miles. Occasionally, I used it like an Italian. One Sunday afternoon, I returned from a Ferrari Club party in OKC to my house, a distance of 125 miles. Did it in exactly 60 minutes, which eclipsed my previous personal best attempts in the 930, some of which were memorable.

As fun as this was, the TR was pretty well-mannered. And it was somewhat sensible. And, it was fairly heavy. Once again, I started wondering about a Countach.

Continued...

Part tre
 

Once again, I started researching every Countach in the US. I had no intentions of importing one, so I spent probably the better part of a year trying to figure out what was hiding in the US. They still weren't legal but Oklahoma didn't pay much attention (if you weren't stupid about yapping to a magazine writer about your latest toy) and I'd started importing the odd motorcycle that wasn't legal, either.

The first one that I considered buying was an orange Lp400. This car was on the December 1975 cover of Car & Driver. It was being sold by Al Burtoni, a long time Lambo dealer and a rather peculiar individual. The price was pretty good, as the paint was pretty weak and the interior was not perfect but it was said to run really well. In the end, I passed on it. A shame, as I later talked to Winston Goodfellow, who ended up buying it and he noted how it had been built a a bit of a ringer. The engine was not exactly stock, as it was designed to impress magazine road test editors, and so it may have been the fastest Lp400 in the US. I later ran across it again, at a Lamborghini dealer in Missouri, where I think it resides to this day.

Assorted Lamborghini inquiries later, I was again in contact with Burtoni, who had the nicest Lp400 he'd ever had his hands on up for sale. It was about double the money of the orange one, but... I had planned to attend the August car events in Monterey with the wife anyway, and Burtoni and the car were located in Gilroy (the garlic capitol of the world!) so I flew out here a couple days ahead of the wife and Al and I went for a ride. He drove first, out in the countryside on some narrow, rather poor condition two lane roads. He was yapping non-stop and covering ground at a rapid rate of knots. He had rebuilt the entire car; engine, gearbox, suspension, new paint and interior and the car did drive pretty well. He was rather proud of it and took testy exception to any question otherwise. I made the mistake of asking him how the synchros were and he demonstrated by downshifting from second to first at probably 30 miles an hour. This, without double-declutching it, just allowing the synchros to do all the work. As an Lp400 used Porsche synchromesh, and I was rather familiar with that, I couldn't argue that he'd not done well on the gearbox rebuild.

I ended up driving the car, looking through all of the photos that he took of the restoration work and we kicked tires on a whole host of other cars he had laying around, some of which I wish I'd gone back and bought later. I told him I'd think about it and went to San Fran to meet up with the wife.

At this point, I had at least 15 or 20 cars, and about that many bikes, so I couldn't say that I hadn't scratched plenty of itches. I was interested in the car, but if you've ever been married, you sense there is a limit out there somewhere. A couple days into the San Fran trip, we walked down to the Sak's store in Union Square. I cooled my heels while the wife went shopping and she ended up wanting a pair of shoes. As she had something like 200 pairs already, and this pair was $600, I was somewhat hesitant. In the end, she got her pair of shoes and we headed back to the hotel. Halfway there, while waiting at a crosswalk, she announced that she thought i ought to buy the Countach. She was happy with her shoes and feeling somewhat generous with my future money, so I took her sage advice and called Al. When i got back to Tulsa, i robbed a bank, wired Al some money and I was now the proud owner of my first Lambo.

Continued...

I got a call one day that my ship had come in. I arranged to meet the truck in a very large parking lot about 5 miles from the house, since I always made a habit of making life easy for the truck drivers that delivered my car purchases. I took the oldest kid with me and off we went to meet the Lambo. It got unloaded without incident, I got the keys and the paperwork and sent the driver on his way. I attached a license plate off of one of my other cars, as it came without any plates at all and Oklahoma doesn't have transit plates, and I wanted something on the back of the thing to keep from giving a cop an easy excuse to stop me.

I had enough gas in the tanks to take the long way home, so I decided to give the rugrat a ride, as his first outing in a Countach had been about a half mile, some years before. We headed south to a long, straight road out in the middle of nowhere. It was out amongst the corn and the cows and was unique, in that it went for miles without a stop sign. It had a speed limit of 45mph, which I routinely ignored, as I seldom saw another car out there. It had a few chicane-like squiggles in the middle of it, so as I passed through that part I lit the fires and started rowing up through the gears. About the time I selected 4th, a car popped up over a hill some distance away. I backed out of it, which was a good thing, as the car turned into a Oklahoma Highway Patrol car, once it got close enough to see it. I hit the brakes and waved as I went by, as by that time I'd learned how to play the game. He flipped an immediate u-turn, lit up his lights and stopped his first Countach. We all got out, had a nice chat and I gave him a little tour of the car. All was going well until he ran the plate. Although it was mine, it was not for the Lambo, and that really pissed him off. I explained the whole thing, which made absolutely no difference to him, and he commenced to order a flat bed to haul off my new toy. This was not going to have a happy ending so I used my best diplomacy and we settled on an expensive ticket, if I drove the thing straight back to the house and promised to never, ever break the speed limit again. Not even on a horse. Okay, suits me.

Continued...

finito
 

So, what's one of these things like?

First, you have to understand that an Lp400 is the first version of the Countach. They built 157 of them and it's the purest expression of the original intent. Bob was somewhat happy with it. The later cars got bigger, heavier and lost some of their exotic parts, which did not make Bob happy. On the other hand, the later cars got revised suspension geometry, better brakes and bigger wheels and tires, which Bob would have liked to have had on the car when it first left the barn. But, enough money was thrown and money waits for no one.

The chassis is constructed of lots and lots of steel tubes, mostly round, with a very thin, hand finished aluminum body. The frame and suspension were to standard race car practice of the early late '60's/'70's. If you've seen a 917 chassis, you get the idea. All of the major castings, like the suspension uprights, were made of Elektron C, which is a magnesium alloy that originated in England. The suspension had zero rubber bushings in it; everything was attached with rod-ends and similar bearings. The wheels were also cast magnesium, 7.5 in front, 9 in the back, by 14 inches. Yep, 14 inches. There was one tire made to fit it, a Michelin XWX, and Michelin hadn't made those in a while. Coker arranged to make some copies, so I had fairly new, rock-hard copies of one of the best tires of the late '60's/ early 70's...

The car is fairly small, much lower than a Ferrari TR, although every bit as wide and shorter than you'd think. It's not overly generous with headroom inside, although you have plenty of width. I don't think either seat in any Lp400 was ever adjusted to a position other than all the way back. Seat belts aren't great, as you recline way too much, so don't plan on rear-ending anybody. The steering wheel is too small but the pedals and shifter position is fine. The pedal cluster is like a race car and everything is lined up fairly well. You'd think that was a given, but you'd be surprised how many mid-engined cars offset either the pedals, or the steering wheel, or both, towards the inside of the car. The gauges are too small and fairly fussy, so hard to read at a glance. They also always had a lot of reflections, so you learned to wear a black shirt when driving the car. When belted in, you can't reach much of anything apart from the steering wheel and shifter, so you set everything else up pre-flight. Apart from ventilation fans, I never screwed with anything. It had a radio that I never used and A/C that was seldom worth using. Rear view mirrors got set very carefully and then never touched again. The doors worked very well and allowed you to park much closer to walls and other cars. They were well balanced and you could roll down the windows (manually) about 3 inches. The shape of the doors was such that anything more was impossible, so I don't know why they bothered. They claimed t was for toll booths but opening a door was a better solution for those. Throwing money through a 3 inch slit was just a stupid idea. The side windows were divided horizontally, so you were constantly looking above, or below this divider if you wanted to see anything to the side. Vision out the front was great; all you saw was road. There was nothing in the front of the car that was visible to the driver. Vision to the rear was okay, you could see things that were about 50 feet behind you, or more. Three quarter rear vision was poor, so you learned to look through the rear quarter windows (look closely, it has them) and then through the radiator exhaust vents, which gave you some notion that there might be something back there, if you paid attention. If you had to back up to depart somewhere, you planned it out thoroughly in your head, before ever sitting in the car. Some people would sit on the side sills, like they were riding a horse side-saddle, with the door open but I left that to the attention whores and other idiots.

To get in, you reached in the NACA vent and pushed the door latch button. The door came up easily and you sat on the sill, facing outwards. You pushed backwards while rotating 90 degrees and sort of fell into the car. It was easier than it sounds. You set all the switches, turned the ignition key to on and waited for the fuel pumps to fill the carbs. They were always bone dry, as residual engine heat would boil all of the gas out of the things when parked. The ticking noise of the fuel pumps would slow down as the carbs got full, so this was the time to prime the motor with the throttle (the accelerator pumps squirted raw fuel in, there were no chokes or fuel enrichment circuits) and you turned the key to start, gave it a little jab of throttle and it would start, if you got it right. You'd use your foot to keep the idle at about 1,000 rpm and you'd wait until the water temp gauge started moving. Once you had a little heat in the system, off you'd go. I waited until I had at least 70C before using more than about 3,000 revs. Really, it was best to wait until it got fully warmed up, as it had way too much carb (think of 2.0 liter 911S cylinders fed with 46mm Webers, only bigger.) It was pretty tractable, up to maybe 3,500 rpm, when it got a little snotty from carb reversion, and didn't want to run well until maybe 4,500 rpm. So in effect you had two powerbands. Down below the snottyness for piddling around town; above it when nobody was around. First gear was even taller than a TR or 930, the rest of the gears were rather short. I sometime thing my car had different ratios in it, as it didn't seem to correspond with what I thought to be the correct road speeds in each gear, but who knows. I never asked Al, I just drove it. It took a little while to get to the redline in first, but subsequent gears lasted maybe 2 or 3 seconds. The pedal effort for all 3 pedals was fairly high, the shifter took a lot of muscle and there were noises coming from everything. Steering was heavy at slow speeds, lightened up some with speed, and was very accurate. There's no doubt it made significant downforce in the front and it tracked laser straight down a decent road at any speed. The only car I've driven with that sort of straight-line stability was a recent 911 turbo S.

It handled like a large go cart and would go exactly where you pointed it. You could actually drive it pretty aggressively, if you were on the throttle. You did have to be careful when getting back into the throttle on a corner exit, if you didn't have enough revs, as the carbs came back in a little abruptly and would make the ass end twitch a little. Better tires would have helped but you only got one choice. Wider wheels were not an option, as the car had no flares and you didn't have any real choices unless you had a pair of wheels made to suit the car. Later Countach wheels would not fit.

Airflow went right by the open windows without so much as peeking inside, so you had whatever the vents would give you, supplemented by weak A/C, if you'd recently topped up the R12. Mornings were best for playing around, preferably in the colder months and before the sun got too high. You had to spend more attention than in other cars keeping an idea of what was around you and if you approached a junction that wasn't at right angles to the road you were on, you had to see what was there before you got to it, as you had limited view of some things to the sides. Gas got burned quickly, which was theoretically offset by the twin tanks holding 13 gallons each. 26 gallons sounds like a lot of gas but you never got that much gas in one. There was a separate filler for each tank, one on each side of the car, so you pulled up to a pump on either side. There was a small transfer tube between the tanks, so you'd fill one up, get in and drive the car to another pump on the other side, all the while fuel was transferring slowly from one tank to the other, so when you got the second tank full, the other tank would no longer be near full. I suppose you could either wait forever and fill both of them from one side, or fill them from two pumps simultaneously, but it was easier for me just to run half full.

Nobody paid you much attention to it while you were driving the car, which was very nice, as I think most people were afraid of it. This is unlike the attention you got in a Ferrari TR. Every redneck jackass in a pickup truck wanted to race that thing and I witnessed three wrecks while driving mine, all from people rear-ending another car while rubber-necking at mine. Idiots. The only car as bad in that respect is a Carrera GT.

Washing the car was an adventure that took forever. The body panels were about .040 thick, so the flat ones, like the front trunk panel, were so weak that the weight of a wet wash mitt would deflect them. RAIN WAS SOMETHING TO BE AVOIDED AT ALL COSTS. The car was very reliable and just needed the usual fluid changes and the occasional rod end in the suspension. The engines leaked a little oil from the 8,000 places that an early Lambo engine can leak, so you just accepted that, much like an early 911 owner. Some spare parts were just non-existent (brake rotors and pads, for one example) so that was a bit irritating. If you should get a rock in the windshield, or one of the ****ing lights, it would ruin your year. That's something like certain Ferraris. Break a light stalk getting into a 328 with your knee (all too easy), or crack a front signal light lens and there goes a thousand bucks. IF, and I say IF, Luigi can find you another one. Takes a lot of the fun out of owning a car...


JR

Thanks JR.

I think this car will always be on my dream list. Unfortunately very few were imported in Aus.

My best option would be to import one from the UK in RHD but I'd need close to a million dollars to do that.
Totally ridiculous when you think about it. :(

The prettiest Maser? Not the Countache

Maserati? They didn't make the Countach...

JR

I mentioned the name Winston Goodfellow earlier. For those of you that don't know him, he's an accomplished writer and photographer who has published numerous books on exotic cars and countless magazine articles. He eventually bought, then later sold, the first Lp400 that I looked at. He's about a year older than I am and when he was in his senior year in high school, out in California, he ran across an Lp400 parked on the street that happened to change his focus on life. As it happens, it was the car that would eventually become mine.

It seems that one of the Saudi crown princes was attending college in Menlo Park, California. He asked his mother for a car and she offered him a choice between a Volkswagen and a Chevrolet. He complained, and the king then sent him a Cadillac, a Rolls and this Lamborghini. As built, it had a white interior (as many of them did, sadly) and some gaudy white accents on some of the exterior panels. Winston's snapshots of the car:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1498501612.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1498501625.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1498501638.jpg

Fortunately, when Al restored the car, it got a new interior in a caramel colored leather and he painted it all red, in the original lacquer used by Lamborghini. It also had a wet bar in the passenger's footwell, which Al deleted. Sadly, no photos of this are known to exist.

You can read a blog post from Winston about the car, here:

A Lamborghini Back in the Day… | The Goodfellow Perspective

There's another quick story on his site about the Lp400 that's worth a read. It involves a famous test driver from Lamborghini, one Lp400, a busty female and a farmer:

http://winstongoodfellow.com/blog/a-small-piece-of-untold-lambo-history/

By the way, that story is illustrated with photos of Winston's Countach, the orange "ringer" that I first considered buying many years ago.

His web site is here:

Winston Goodfellow | Writer & Photographer

He's a great guy, very knowledgeable about Italian sports cars and has a million stories to tell.

JR

I'll just leave this here...

https://www.classicdriver.com/en/article/classic-life/incredible-story-valentino-balboni

Valentino's boss, Bob, testing the first prototype Countach. Most of the testing was done on public roads. This car was quite a bit different from the eventual production versions, having a larger 5 liter engine was one of the differences, the others including a different rear view mirror arrangement and very few cooling scoops and vents. Although Bob is pictured in the car with no seatbelts, he did much of the testing with a 4-point race harness, as much of it was done at very high speed to test the aero design. The Miura had been very poor at high speeds and he wasn't going to make that mistake again. Note the chase car, parked next to him adjacent to the Autostrada.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1498503812.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1498503827.jpg

30 years ago I worked for a Sarkis Najarian who said he had been a test driver for Lamborghini back in the day. No idea if true. He did have a pic of him sitting on a Countach on the wall but that was it for "proof."

Bastard stole my Lotus Elan S2 engine.

Great stories, JR.

I watched the OP's vid. The dude is pretty cool. He mentions rose joints.

Here is a rose joint for those that don't know like I didn't. No idea where the name originated.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1498518794.jpg

From wiki:

The spherical rod end bearing was developed by Nazi Germany during World War II. When one of the first German planes to be shot down by the British in early 1940 was examined, they found this joint in use in the aircraft's control systems. Following this discovery, the Allied governments gave the H.G. Heim Company an exclusive patent to manufacture these joints in North America, while in the UK the patent passed to Rose Bearings Ltd. The ubiquity of these manufacturers in their respective markets led to the terms heim joint and rose joint becoming synonymous with their product. After the patents ran out the common names stuck, although as of 2017 "rosejoint" remains a registered trademark of Minebea Mitsumi Inc., successor to Rose Bearings Ltd.