Not many 40-somethings can still stop traffic just by showing up, but the Lamborghini Countach does exactly that four decades after it debuted here in Geneva in 1971. Marcello Gandini's masterpiece is this audacious, aloof, leering thing that avoids the overly curvaceous lines that long ago became Italian cliche. Instead it's a piece of Piedmontese origami, all creased, slatted, and ducted. It looks like it was designed yesterday in the way a Mies van der Rohe building or vintage Knoll table does.

Study the pure Countach LP400 to really take in Gandini's work, though in your mind's eye you're probably seeing a winged & flared LP400 S or 500 S, which graced the covers of car magazines for years and even bumped Farrah Fawcett off a few walls in their day.

Just as remarkable is the Countach drivetrain layout: To even out the weight distribution everything is sitting in there backward, with the engine at the far rear, transmission bolted ahead of it (requiring the engine to "face" the back of the car), and a drive shaft carrying power from the front of this arrangement back under the engine to the rear axle.

You don't need to drive a Countach to sample it: Morley Safer of "60 Minutes" did that and did so wonderfully in my favorite piece of automotive video. Long available on the Web only as a blotchy bootleg, I'm pleased to say the "60 Minutes" team has located and digitized a pristine official version of it that you see debuting below.

Lamborghini Countach - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A total of 2,042 cars were built during the Countach's sixteen year lifetime:
prototype LP400 LP400S LP500S LP5000QV 25 Anniversary
1 157 237 321 676 650

The Lamborghini Countach was a mid-engined sports car produced by Italian automaker Lamborghini from 1974 to 1990. Its design both pioneered and popularized the wedge-shaped, sharply angled look popular in many high performance sports cars. The "cabin-forward" design concept, which pushes the passenger compartment forward in order to accommodate a larger engine, was also popularized by the Countach.

In 2004, American car magazine Sports Car International named this car number three on the list of Top Sports Cars of the 1970s, and it was listed as number ten on their list of Top Sports Cars of the 1980s. Top Gear placed it at number 1 on their list of "100 Sexiest Supercars of All Time" (supplied with the June edition of Top Gear)