When it came along in the early Seventies, your Dad was pottering about in a Ford Cortina or maybe a Morris Marina, and then one day, a company he couldn’t pronounce unveiled a car the likes of which the world had never seen.
I once wondered, on television, how New Yorkers must have felt when Brunel’s propeller-driven liner, the SS Great Britain, steamed into their harbour. Because there they were, with their horses and their coracles, when into their midst came a metal ship that had no obvious means of propulsion. They must have felt very backward. Almost as backward as they felt in 1977 when Concorde screamed into JFK for the first time.
Well, that’s what I felt like as a 14-year-old boy when I first saw a Countach. I couldn’t believe any of it. Not the noise. Not the lowness — it was only 42in tall. Not the vast rear wing. Not the monstrous size of the tyres. And certainly not the claims that it would do 170mph. At the time, you must remember, the world was a slower place so 170 was about Mach 6.
It was many years before I actually got to drive one, and oh my God ... as disappointments go, this was like getting your girlfriend’s kit off for the first time and discovering she had an Adam’s apple.
The steering wasn’t heavy. An elephant is heavy. A school is heavy. An American is heavy. The Lambo’s steering was in another league. Sometimes, you’d try to turn the wheel to go round a corner and, for a fleeting moment, you actually thought the whole system had jammed.
And then there was the clutch. If they’d set the pedal in concrete, it would have been easier to depress. And all the while, you were rammed into a space that was tiny and very, very hot. I’m sure you’ve all seen The Bridge on the River Kwai hundreds of times, which means I’m also sure you remember the box in which Alec Guinness was made to live. Well, imagine being in there, on a sweaty day, while doing a full SAS workout, at 170mph. That’s what it was like in a Countach.
Parking, however, was even worse because you could not see out of the back, at all. The window would only wind down an inch. The car was wider than the owner of a Cheshire tanning salon and, to complicate everything even more, you could be assured you would be trying to get kerbside while under the scrutiny of a very sizeable audience.
You might have imagined as you took delivery of your new Lamborghini that you would spend the rest of your life drowning in girls. ’Fraid not. Because you didn’t step out of a Countach; you crawled out, sweating, exhausted and dehydrated to the point of death. Sex? It was the absolute last thing on your mind.
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