In 1985 an enthusiast ordered a Countach Quattrovalvole, selected the leather himself and later went to Sant’Agata to watch it being built. Two years on, it was delivered to him at The Grosvenor House on Park Lane.
In 1985 Ferrari built a car with 390 horsepower. Lamborghini, being Lamborghini, built one with 455. Neither firm has ever quite let the matter rest. The Ferrari was the Testarossa, about a tenth cheaper and broadly the sensible choice, insofar as anything with cheese-grater flanks can be called sensible. The Lamborghini was the Countach 5000 Quattrovalvole, unveiled at Geneva that March. Sensible did not come into it. By then the Countach was already fourteen years old, but not in spirit. Gandini’s prototype had stopped Geneva in its tracks in 1971. Its name came from a Piedmontese exclamation that one of Bertone’s craftsmen used so freely while shaping the body that Gandini suggested, half in jest, they call the car after it. The word is best translated loosely. More than a decade on, the shape still made new cars look timid.
Lamborghini’s keepers by the mid-eighties were an unlikely pair. The firm had gone bankrupt in 1978 and been rescued by the Mimran brothers, whose family fortune came from sugar in Senegal. The brothers hired Giulio Alfieri as technical director. He had spent more than twenty years at Maserati, where his work included the 250F, and was dismissed by Alejandro de Tomaso on de Tomaso’s first day as owner. Maserati’s loss became Sant’Agata’s ammunition. Alfieri took the V12 out to 5.2 litres, gave it four valves per cylinder and set six downdraught Webers between the cylinder banks. That demanded a hump in the engine cover, which removed what little rear view the Countach had ever offered. Nobody buying one seems to have minded. With 455 bhp the QV comfortably out-powered the Testarossa, and even Ferrari’s 288 GTO. Its engine would go on to serve the final Anniversary cars unchanged. Some 610 to 630 were built, and only a few dozen in right-hand drive for Britain.
Then there was the wing. It began with Walter Wolf, the Canadian oil trader and Formula 1 team owner. In the mid-seventies he tried to improve his Countach by having a spoiler from one of his racing cars bolted to the roof. It did no good, so Gian Paolo Dallara drew a proper one. The production wing was never fitted on the line. By most accounts it cost the QV a dozen miles an hour at the top end, and Valentino Balboni, the factory’s test driver, preferred his cars without it. Customers ordered it anyway. It did not need to work; it needed to be seen.
Which brings us to London, and to one particular customer. In 1985 he placed his order through Portman Lamborghini of George Street. He specified Rosso Siviglia and selected the leather himself, and the interior was trimmed by Paratelli in the Sant’Agata factory. He also asked for a second boot lid, wing attached, so that he could have it both ways. Before the car was finished, he travelled to Sant’Agata to see it on the production line. By the time it was ready, Lamborghini belonged to Chrysler. He had ordered his car from a pair of sugar magnates and would collect it from Detroit.
Picture Park Lane in August 1987. The traffic is the usual mixture of black cabs and large saloons belonging to people who have come to look at other people. A red wedge arrives from Marylebone, scarcely higher than a doorman’s waist, and stops outside the Grosvenor House Hotel. The doors swing upwards rather than outwards, which Park Lane still does not see every day. The keys are handed over, along with a leather wallet of handbooks. After two years of waiting, the owner folds himself into the seat and reaches for pedals set inboard in the true Italian manner. He turns the key. Twelve cylinders clear their throats beneath the hotel’s windows. Heads turn. Afternoon tea is briefly forgotten.
He kept the car for more than a quarter of a century, in which time it covered fewer miles than many company cars manage in a year. It has had three owners in all and has never left Britain. It has been looked after throughout by people who understood that one does not keep a Countach for its practicality, Ian Tyrell among them. Today it shows fewer than 6,900 kilometres, still wears its wing and still has its plain lid in reserve. To drive it is to be reminded how much a modern supercar does on your behalf. The Countach does almost nothing on your behalf. Everything is mechanical and direct, the view ahead is all windscreen and wings, and behind your head the V12 makes a noise once reserved for aircraft. You do not so much operate the car as take part in it.
Ferrari and Lamborghini are still arguing about horsepower, now with figures that would have seemed fantastical in 1985. Neither has built anything quite like this since. In that particular argument, the last word may well belong to the Countach, and the word is still Piedmontese. This Countach Quattrovalvole is now on offer from Brian Classic & Co., and we would be delighted to show it to you. We cannot promise the Grosvenor House, but we can promise the noise.
