Monday, May 26, 2008

Lamborghini Countach @ NKVE

I am so impressed by Stan's 5 megapixel Nokia N95 camera-phone!


Wow, lucky Stan ... he managed to see one of a total of 2,042 Countach's every built!


Wikipedia on this classic ...
The Lamborghini Countach was a mid-engined sports car produced by Italian automaker Lamborghini from 1974 to 1990.
The design of the Countach popularized, but did not pioneer, the wedge-shaped, sharply angled look popular in many high performance supercars. The "cabin-forward" design concept, which pushes the passenger compartment forward in order to accommodate a larger engine, was also popularized by the Countach.
The word countach (Pronounced kun-taj) is an exclamation of astonishment in the local Piedmontese language - generally used by men on seeing an extremely beautiful woman. While the term is often considered untranslatable into English, it is essentially equivalent to the British lager lout verbalization "Fwwaaaa", or it can also be considered the verbal equivalent of a Wolf Whistle.

The Countach name stuck when Nuccio Bertone first saw "Project 112" in his studio. The prototype was introduced to the world at the 1971 Geneva Motor Show. Most previous Lamborghini car names were associated with bulls and bullfighting.

In 2004, Sports Car International named this car number three on the list of Top Sports Cars of the 1970s, and it was listed as number ten on their list of Top Sports Cars of the 1980s. The Countach has been discontinued for 18 years and still enjoys a massive fan appreciation.

The Countach was styled by Marcello Gandini of the Bertone design studio, the same designer and studio that designed the Miura. Gandini was then a young, inexperienced designer—not very experienced in the practical, ergonomic aspects of automobile design, but at the same time unhindered by them. He produced a quite striking design. The Countach shape was wide and low (42.1 inches), but not very long. Its angular and wedge-shaped body was made almost entirely of flat, trapezoidal panels. There were curves, notably the smoothly coke-bottle wing line, but the overall appearance was sharp.

No comments: