A Car Life, By Larry Crane

The telephone startled me out of a sound workload. It had been a long day at the typewriter. As I attempted to gather my wits and the phone, I hoped both would arrive near my head at about the same time. The fellow on the other end—Dick Thompson—reintroduced himself. We had met a couple of weeks earlier at a gathering of odd car guys (you can put that together any way you like). Dick was a mechanical engineer who specialized in DOT chassis modifications for the gray market (cars that could be brought into the country and modified to meet the new U.S. safety regulations before being licensed for the road). He had told me when something interesting arrived in his shop he’d let me know. A man of his word, this was the call.

“Ever seen a Countach?” he asked with a grin I could hear through my end of the phone line.
“Never,” I replied, trying to sound cool. I wondered if he could hear my heart palpitations as well as I could hear his grin.
“One just arrived. It’s still on the truck, but by the time you get here we’ll have it in the shop.”
“Great! Thanks. I’ll see you in about 40 minutes.”

As I hung up the phone I realized how late in the afternoon it had become. Benny the Ficus was dappling my desk with gold-toned shadows. It was close to four o’clock. In a few minutes everything that had to be done was done, and my old Lancia B20 and I rushed out to Goleta to see the latest generation of Italian exotic.

Richard had heard the B20’s blown-out exhaust system a couple of blocks away and greeted me with a steaming cup of that morning’s coffee. I took a sip and felt the ends of my mustache curl as we walked through the office and out into the shop.

There in a sweep of copper-colored sunlight was the flattest, most radical-looking, giant doorstop I had ever seen. And it was black.

“Whaddya think?” Richard couldn’t stop grinning. He had seen and worked on everything including a couple of other Countachs but this one was the new “S” model with the wide tires and fender flares. He was as excited as I was.
“It’s a sinister-looking devil. Demonic, I said in a fit of redundancy. “And it’s so small.”
“But what a presence.” Richard just continued to stare and grin.
“Wanna go for a ride?”
“Are you kidding?”
“It came with a one-trip pass so I can give it a test drive before I take it apart. We can do 40 or 50 miles.”
As we approached the car, I realized I had no idea how to get in. “How do I do it?”
“Just reach into the NACA duct, push the button up and lift the door—kind of one motion.”
I followed the instructions and the long door rose with my hand, like a giant cutting blade with a window in it. As I looked down at the wide sill and small sweep of seat way over there in the middle of the car, I repeated my question. “How do I get in?”
“Just sit on the sill and swing your legs in, then slide off into the seat,” he said as he did just that.
I did and it sort of worked, but my head was jammed firmly against the roof.
“Larry, slide your butt down the curve of the seat until you’re about where you want to be, then buckle up.”
“Got it.”

Richard and his assistant had already checked the engine for leaks and problems before I arrived, so he was confident the car was ready. The key was in the ignition. Like the Ferraris I was familiar with, you turn the key about a quarter turn to start the fuel pumps. As the carbs fill, the pumping slows and a couple of stabs on the throttle prime the cylinders. With your foot off the throttle, the key is rotated another quarter turn, give it a gentle push and the big 12 barks instantly to life and quickly settles to a raucous burble.

“It’s a lot roomier in here than it looks from the outside. I can actually stretch my legs,” I remarked.
“Yeah,” my host replied with a serious look on his face as he jerked the gear lever, sprouting from its black gate, into reverse. With just a brush of the accelerator pedal the burble climbed to a mild roar, which seemed to come from just behind my fresh haircut.

It did, of course, come from very close by. The seatback didn’t quite touch the firewall. My left elbow rested on a broad piece of leather only a few inches from the gearbox, which pointed forward with the shift lever at its leading end. That was a very clever way for Lamborghini’s Dallara/Stanzani design team to eliminate the troublesome linkage that is the nemesis of mid-engine sports and racing cars. The primary purpose for the arrangement was to get more of the weight toward the front axle so as to improve front/rear weight distribution.

As Richard selected first gear and accelerated off in the direction of Cathedral Oaks Road, I became acutely aware of the gearbox being inside the cockpit. It fairly howled. Had it been at the rear, the engine’s roar would have drowned out the sound, but this way I got the full benefit of both.
The upper ratios of the box got a bit quieter—or did the road noise just make them more difficult to identify? By the time we were flying down Cathedral Oaks toward Santa Barbara and lovely old Mountain Drive, my heart and brain had calmed to a point where I could focus my attention on the functions of the machine.

Robust would not adequately describe the bridge-like structure masquerading as a space frame. The racecar suspension was firm but compliant, though it did transmit every variation of the road into the car.

Mountain Drive is a narrow, perhaps one-and-a-half lane wide, serpentine road that meanders across the face of the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara, California. The view is breathtaking. Below are the red tile roofs of the neo-Spanish colonial town, seemingly stretched down to touch the palm-lined arch of one of the most beautiful bays on the Pacific coast. I could scarcely see the road through the radically raked windshield. The side windows were divided both vertically and horizontally by metal tracks in order to fit a tiny window opening in the tubular body shape. Fortunately, there were trees, taller than the car, which I could see out the top of my window or I might have felt lost in space. Actually, old Mountain Drive was not in the best of shape so there was no doubt in my mind or my posterior that we were in contact with the ground most of the time.

When the chassis was in control, the brutally efficient Lamborghini swept around tight turns and sweeping bends with precision and confidence. But occasionally little washes of sand, which tend to unnerve us motorcyclists, did upset the car. It would slip a foot or two this way or that, then chirp its tires and launch itself in the direction of the next turn. By the time we had returned to Cathedral Oaks Road, my stomach had explored the limits of its tolerance. The loads generated by hard acceleration, hard braking, hard cornering and hard potholes had nearly done me in. As the road straightened, Richard pulled to the side and asked, “Like to drive?”
Perfect! Adrenaline was rushing around in my brain, lunch was rushing around in my stomach and I was hardly in any condition to walk around the car, let alone to negotiate the entry procedure—never mind to drive.
“Sure!” I was hoping he couldn’t see my uncertainty. I managed to get myself into the driver’s seat without undue humiliation and pushed in the clutch.
“Geeez! This is a man’s car, isn’t it?” I said as I wondered if my left leg would be in any condition to make my daily jog the next morning.

The shifter was a thing of wonder for a mid-engine car. It was absolutely precise, but not without effort. I engaged first and let out the clutch as I tried to turn quickly onto the road. The steering wheel simply refused. Quickly reconsidering, I took a sweeping approach to the road and wondered if my benefactor had noticed. At parking lot speed, the steering effort would preclude any argument with your wife about using the Countach for a shopping trip.
My drive was too brief, but my confidence built with my euphoria. As I parked near the shop, I was aware of a huge grin on my face. It was dark now but I could see Richard’s grin out of the corner of my eye.
“Neat, huh?”
I just grinned.

Read about Joe Nastasi and importing the Countach to America.