Lamborghini has brought back the Countach LP 500, originally built in 1971, with the help of PPG, which provided the car manufacturer with the original Giallo Fly Speciale signature yellow paint.
Lamborghini has recreated the original Countach LP 500 concept car that debuted at the Geneva Auto Show in 1971 and was destroyed in 1974 during crash testing for development of the production model.
Nothing from the original model remained, including the 1:1 scale model used during its design. Therefore, Lamborghini had to rely on archive material, including sketches, photographs and meeting notes, as well as the memories of the original car’s creators to build the recreation.
“The collection of documents was crucial. There had been so much attention paid to all the details of the car, to their overall consistency and to the technical specifications”, said Giuliano Cassataro Head of Polo Storico restoration team.
The car, commissioned in 2017 by an important Lamborghini customer, took 25,000 hours of work to complete by the Lamborghini Polo Storico restoration team, which employed period-correct components. Polo Storico even mimicked hand-built construction methods used by Lamborghini at the time to ensure complete authenticity, like panel-beating by hand, although it used modern scanning software to analyse photographs of the original concept so as to copy its proportions exactly.
To ensure maximum adherence with the original car, Lamborghini contracted Pirelli to create a one-off set of 1971-specification Cinturato CN12 tyres, albeit using a more modern compound and structure than available back then.
For the paint colour, Lamborghini enlisted the help of paint manufacturer PPG, which dug into its archive to create an exact match for that worn by the LP 500 concept: Giallo Fly Speciale.
“To arrive at the car that debuted in Geneva in 1971, a 1:1 scale styling model was developed, which along with the car itself was lost over time, but extensive photographic evidence of it remains. This is the same approach with which we decided to tackle the project. Starting from publications of the time, from images on homologation sheets and other material recovered from Polo Storico, we were able to reconstruct the mathematics necessary for creating the first 1:1 scale model. The biggest challenge was to create the exact volume of the car, and for this we used the opportunity to take a 3D scan of our LP 400 (chassis 001), which was an enormous source of information. It took us 2000 hours of work altogether to arrive at the final model with lines that satisfied us. The exact same procedure was followed for the interior”, explained Mitja Borkert, Lamborghini’s head of design.