Analysing/Redesigning The Lamborghini Countach: A Hollow Cash Grab or Honourable Homage?!

no it's not contact but rather countach welcome back benvolutiatuti today we speak about the lamborghini this has probably been the most requested car since starting my youtube channel this card today that i'm going to be speaking about is the reinterpretation of the original lamborghini countach [Music] now the lamborghini countach is a very very very significant car in automotive design especially in supercar design and this car was done by bertone and it was penned by marcelo gandini now marcelo gandini had this idea that he was going to do a radical new design for lamborghini and they wanted the car to be incredibly engaging from an aesthetic point of view as well as from a performance point of view now what that resulted in was the ultimate wedge shape something that was out of this world when you saw the countach for the first time typically a jaw dropping moment now for me the starting point for the countach should always be considered the lp112 but it had to be optimized it wasn't perfect when it came out had a lot of issues and for that reason for me the lp 500 is the countach that i hold most dear most closely to my heart now the lp 500 as a starting point i think is what lamborghini today has based their new design their new let's call it the countach lp i 800-4 2 million pounds or euros plus so that's very expensive they're only going to build 112 of them that's because of the lp 112 code name this one that we're going to be looking at today harks back to the more original ones and in that sense i think they've done the right decision to base it off of something that anybody who saw that car for the first time again really got the heartbeat going [Music] so now having said all that looking at the car from a front three-quarter view i see immediately that i'm looking at a modern version an up-to-date version of the couldn't touch is it far enough forward that is the question i'm thinking right now i have to say the car doesn't stretch enough into the future to be a new version of the lamborghini countach it's based on the underpinnings of the aventador which means they're restricted they cannot change the hard points that's not to say the aventador is bad but the aventador came out in 2011. we are 10 years further into the future now we're in 2021 and i think the countach of all cars one of all cars in the history of car design merits a new look a revisit and especially if you're going to pay 2.5 million of whatever you've got to get this car you deserve something that is let's call it from the ground up new and respects that wellness that the countach absolutely deserves [Music] so one of the first things that i really do like on the front end of this car that really reminds me of the original ones is the very thin horizontal slit that goes through the front end you've got a few intakes on the side which add a little bit of aggression for me understanding that lamborghini is about very sharp edges very defined edges i would perhaps look at the area the headlights here that for me are straying a little bit away from that essence of of countach the original contacts where they had the pop-up headlights the retractable headlights i think there might be a way to actually readdress the headlights to give us that impression of a pop-up headlight a retractable headlight without actually being a retractable headlight there are methods today that you can actually perhaps have something like a sliding cover that just allows the light to pop through there are ways perhaps that we can make the eyes the look of the front end much more countach original contact looking i think the angled headlights give it a little bit of almost uh a squint that can look a little bit perhaps perhaps uh evil evil-ish and now moving on to the side i love the profile of this car i see a few things also that don't bug me but my sense of design is slightly different i think if we start readdressing the actual hexagon shapes that we have here where the door shut line is for me that's too far back we're talking scissor door design on this car because lamborghini was the first production car to introduce scissor door design we're not going to leave that behind we're going to keep it but we're going to change a little bit the hexagonal arch is typically very very very countach-like especially in the back one i think also that the a-pillar of the countach here is a little bit too thick there's no reason in this day and age to make the a-pillars look so thick as we come down here and the glass line the belt line on the side here has that dip that's something that i struggle a little bit with because it's such a jolt to come down and then angle so quickly back up that is lamborghini i've seen it done before i don't want to lose that but i think we have to readdress it slightly such that it works better overall now another issue that i have on this car specifically is the exterior mirrors again recall the original lp 400 with its periscope which means a periscope they had the mirror actually placed above so you had the the rear view coming out of the center of the roof forward center of the roof that worked very well that was a extremely iconic element of design another critical element extremely critical element on this car is probably the main graphic on the side and that has completely let me down you have to understand that the original lp112 and the original lp 500 had problems with air intake and air flow on the side of the car getting air sufficient cooling into the engine on a fire breathing v12 it needs air so what did lamborghini come up with they didn't actually invent it this is a design that was actually created by the national advisory committee for aeronautics and that's something called the naca duck naca duct is basically the best way to get a low drag inlet design with minimal disturbance to the airflow of getting air into the engine so that's why the shape of the intake duct on the side of an lp 400 is the way it is so i want to keep that knack of duck on the side of this new interpretation of the car in such a way that it looks great and it works great now another issue that i would really address on the design is this area of the quarter glass just behind the door around the c-pillar area and that is very much like what we saw on the lp 500 when you're looking at an aqueduct that extends or at least an intake duct like they've done it here you're losing the cohesion between this area and that area and we need to find a way to make it work and another thing that i think would help as well is to darken this area here such that you increase the visual length of the greenhouse that's usually a good thing it stretches the car longitudinally that's good we don't want cars to go up we want them to go that way so i think it will help us to redesign this area here obviously it needs to be an intake and we can do that i'm sure in a way that will beautify it as well as stay functional as well as work with the other elements around it then moving on to the rear where we have the hexagonal rear wheel arch cut out that shape there works obviously it's very much influenced from the original countach and it's kind of speaking with the front one but as soon as i change the front one it's going to throw this one off and they're going to be like perhaps brother and sister or cousins they're not going to be closely related and on a car and you have two elements that are fairly close to each other they should they should relate now as we come back with the center line and we reach this point here that's very lamborghini countach from the original version what i want to try and address is something perhaps even a little bit higher because what i'm going to be looking at is optimizing the airflow off the back of the car then we want to make this one have something what we call active arrow that means a part of the design part of the body work that only works in certain situations it's not always needed so to have a massive mahouse of wing on the back perhaps looks cool but in this day and age it's old-fashioned so i want to find a way to make the car have that visual impact of the spoilers that we remember from the s versions of this car but in a much more quiet understated manner it's only there when you need it when it's not it recesses back into the body work almost as if it wasn't there in the first place now moving on to the rear view i love rear ends i love to make the rear ends almost become the crowning element of the design of a car and i'm going to have a field day with this one because that rear end for me lacks so much design potential that could be inserted into it now i'm biting off probably a little bit more than i can chew but i want to tackle the rear end and give it a much much more striking rear end and i think i can do it simply by a few tricks like exposing much more the rear of the tire from the rear view that's very typical from the original lamborghini countach if you look at it they really show those chunky rear tires in the back the taillights complete let down for me because i know where those tail lights came from like i said at the beginning this car deserves its own tail lights so i'm going to readdress the shape of the taillights make them fit this car in such a way that it's exciting to see the car with the taillights on the diffuser on this car i i would be hesitant to do anything radical to it but maybe we can dress it up in a different way that maybe allows the license plate the reg plate on the back to be better incorporated not so old-fashioned the way it looks on the way it looks here one last element that is critical to the design of the countach is the quad exhaust pipe for exhaust pipes how can you go wrong the only way to improve them is to improve the shape of them improve the shape of them for aesthetic reasons not a good idea round shapes are fantastic for sound we try to keep our pipes coming out of the rear end nice and round and so we're going to try and do that but maybe in a little bit of a different way on this car to add a little bit of visual excitement to the exhaust pipes one other point i feel very strongly about is when you look at the original countach one thing that you immediately appreciate that you notice that really stands out that differentiates his car over so many other cars is the amount of tumble home now i've said what temple of home is in the past i've explained it but i'll quickly tell you what it is when you take the belt line where the glass meets the body of the car that point there going upwards that angle is what we talk about when we consider the word when we use the word tumblehome now on the original countach it's quite extreme limits a little bit the interior headroom but on this car with the width that we have on it i think we can afford to go in a little bit and if we can't let's push the driver and passenger slightly closer together to get that effect of the tumble home and let's not forget we're reducing the amount of frontal surface area which can only be a good thing so we're going to move the top of the glass inwards slightly or as much as we can do it to get that tumble home effect increase it make it look dramatic so in summary what i think the new lamborghini lp 800-4 does really well is it captures the essence of the original lamborghini countach up to a certain point having been based off of a car that already is existing means it's pretty much attached to that same design language that same engineering excellence that came out with that original base of a car which was the 2011 aventador if i could see this car moving onwards into the future another 10 years 2021 then i would have been happy with this design at the same time i'm not saying i dislike this car i love the purity of the design they've done a great job handling the proportions of this car and the details just a few extra little bits of hours and late nighters would have made this car perhaps the definitive successor to the lamborghini countach [Music] i'm going to be adjusting a lot of the lines on this car a lot of the shut lines i'm going to be reducing the amount of panels on this car i'm going to make it a little bit more fluid but fluid let's call it in a versace way [Music] [Applause] [Music] before i give a rating on this car let's remember that there are iconic cars in history that have been reinterpreted some have been hit some have been misses but whenever you try to redesign an icon you're playing with fire you risk getting burned and in that sense for me this car almost makes it but it's not there it needs a little bit more fine-tuning and then i think it would have reached a very high number yet i have to give it at this moment looking at it the way it is a 7.9 my honest feeling is that lamborghini's milking the cash cow based on the awesome reputation of the original lamborghini countach makes me a little bit sad nice at its back but again there are not enough original parts and innovation involved in the design of this car so it doesn't put it into that league of what you should expect for 2 million plus 2 million is a lot of money i'm not a marketing or a finance guy but i think you know 500 half a million might cut it now despite everything i've just said all 112 of these vehicles have been sold as always thank you very much for watching much appreciated let me know in the comments below what you think of the new lamborghini countach love seeing your comments your remarks and we'll see you in the next episode ciao grazie milestopo lastly i've teamed up with fireball tim lawrence of fireball publishing to bring out available worldwide on amazon the official frank stephenson coloring book so be sure you go on amazon and order your copy from today on i'd love to see your work so be sure to hashtag them under hashtag frank stephenson challenge and that way we'll have them all in one place and i'll be able to select the very coolest ones and feature them all in an upcoming video [Music]

Channel: Frank Stephenson

Views: 232,826

Keywords: frank Stephenson, lamborghini, countach, car design, how to design, supercar, aventador

Id: TgQ6mgrVRLM

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021