Thursday, October 01, 2020

Lamborghini Countach



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. Gandini produced a striking design. The Countach shape was wide and low (42.1 inches), but not very long (only 163 inches). Its angular and wedge-shaped body was made almost entirely of flat, trapezoidal panels.
The doors, a Countach trademark, were scissor doors: hinged at the front with horizontal hinges, so that the doors lifted up and tilted forwards. The main reason is the car’s tubular spaceframe chassis results in very high and wide door sills. It was also partly for style, and partly because the width of the car made conventional doors impossible to use in an even slightly confined space. Care needed to be taken, though, in opening the doors with a low roof overhead. The car’s poor rear visibility and wide sills led to drivers adopting a method of reversing the car for parking by opening the door, sitting on the sill, and reversing while looking over the back of the car from outside.
The rear wheels were driven by a traditional Lamborghini V12 engine mounted longitudinally with a mid-engined configuration. This contrasted with the Miura, on which the centrally mounted engine had been installed transversely. For better weight distribution, the engine is pointed “backwards”; the output shaft is at the front, and the gearbox is in front of the engine, the driveshaft running back through the engine’s sump to a differential at the rear. Although originally planned as a 5 liter powerplant, the first production cars used the Lamborghini Miura’s 4 liter engine. Later advances increased the displacement to 4.8 liters and then (in the “Quattrovalvole” model) 5.2 L with four valves per cylinder.
All Lamborghini Countaches were equipped with six Weber carburetors until the arrival of the 5000QV model, at which time the car became available in America, and used Bosch K-Jetronic fuel injection. The European models, however, continued to use the carburetors (producing more power than fuel injected cars) until the arrival of the Lamborghini Diablo, which replaced the Countach.
The models produced between 1974 to 1990 were, Prototype LP 500, LP 400, LP 400S, LP 500S, 5000QV, Anniversary Countach and Walter Wolf Countach. Its design both pioneered and popularized the wedge-shaped, sharply angled look popular in many high performance sports cars. 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 is an exclamation of astonishment generally used by men on seeing an extremely beautiful woman.
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 and subsequent Lamborghini car names were associated with bulls and bullfighting.
In 2004, American car magazine Sports Car International named the 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.

Lamborghini Register


More about this car and other Greatest Cars on; www.in2motorsports.com 











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