Lamborghini Countach

The Lamborghini Countach replaced the Miura as Sant'Agata's flagship and rewrote what a supercar was supposed to look like. Styled by Marcello Gandini at Bertone, its sharp wedge silhouette, flat body planes and cab-forward stance became the template for the Italian mid-engined exotic. The name comes from a Piedmontese exclamation of astonishment, said to have been uttered by a workman who first saw the prototype. Beneath the angular bodywork sat a longitudinally mounted V12, with the gearbox placed ahead of the engine and running back between the seats.

The Countach was among the first production cars to use upward-swinging scissor doors, a feature Lamborghini would carry through its later flagship models. It stayed in production for sixteen years, evolving from the comparatively pure early LP400 into progressively wider, more aggressively winged and more powerful versions as engine displacement grew across its life. Flared arches, fatter tyres and, on many cars, a large rear wing came to define the poster-era image of the car.

Produced from 1974 to 1990, the Countach spanned generations from the LP400 to the four-valve Quattrovalvole and the closing 25th Anniversary edition, whose bodywork was reworked by a young Horacio Pagani. Across that run it fixed the scissor-doored, wedge-profiled V12 as Lamborghini's core identity, and its image on countless bedroom walls made it one of the most recognisable performance cars of its era.