The dream of the Eighties is alive and well in London — well, OK, 1990, which still counts as the Eighties. The end of a decade never stops after 10 years, it drags on for just a few more after that — as far as anyone’s concerned, the Eighties stopped being the Eighties in 1993, sometime between the cancellation of the McDLT and the premiere of Legends of the Hidden Temple.
That’s right — the Eighties revival is well under way! We’re reopening the Jazzercise centers. We’re raiding our closets for pixie boots and paneled leggings. Irony is in the air, can you smell it? Overpriced, stone-washed, Obama-style Dad jeans are back in (some sort of) style, according to Urban Outfitters! We’re paying entirely too much money for pristine E30 BMWs, the dream of the yuppie class, and we’re going to drive around listening to Chromeo and Daft Punk from our cassette adapter that craps out at every stoplight from here to the Roxy. Giorgio Moroder, flush off revived royalties, can afford to fill up his kidney-shaped pool with the white stuff for the first time since the Max Headroom incident. Jerry Wiegert enjoys a second life on Twitter. We’re still trying to build that Robocop statue. We can make a gritty Ninja Turtles movie. Again. I believe in this, America.
Too old for Farah Fawcett, too young for the Porsche 959. For a generation of enthusiasts, the Countach came at exactly the right time.
And I believe that this 25th Anniversary Lamborghini Countach, in poster-worthy red, is the ultimate display of a future gone horribly wrong, but also horribly right — a wedge of the future from 1974, a world of Syd Mead optimism and concept-supercar exotica, sullied into cheesiness by wings and gold wheels and assorted filigree — yet, somehow, becoming great in its own right.
Say what you will about the rose-tinted past of 30-something Gen-X “youth” who hung these over their walls — but the bodywork, gently evolved from the 5000 QV by a certain Mr. Horacio Pagani, certainly inspired a generation. To do what? To appreciate cars as sculpture, to dream faster, to go faster, to watch the opening from Cannonball Run until Adrienne Barbeau‘s cleavage is burned into the Zenith CRT. Half our Autoweek staff had the Countach poster, possibly the one with the babe on it. (Born a decade too late, my poster options were of a Pontiac Banshee and a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, so my opinions don’t count for anything.) If this 25th Anniversary Countach is an affront to an initial purity, then don’t tell the children.
Countach values have been buoyed by the success of the “Periscopica” Countach that broke the vaunted $1 million mark earlier this year, it would be no surprise to see that rising tide lift all cigarette boats. This red Countach above, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, has just 2,700 kilometers on it — just 1,600 or so miles, and is one of just 657 examples built in 1990. The last cassingle, indeed. To finally make good on the dreams of your middle-school self will cost an estimated $230,000 to $300,000, when it goes up for auction at RM Auctions’ London event on Sept. 8. Greed is good, right? Let’s go jam out to Lazerhawk.
Mirrors like semaphore flags, bumper intakes like bull nostrils…the Lamborghini Countach is still a dream of an era. Today’s era.