Yahoo Autos Up Close and Personal With the One and Only Cannonball Run Lamborghini Countach
AND…ACTION! The scene opens with a car chase, cops on the hunt for a black Lamborghini Countach LP400S driven by two buxom women in skintight neon bodysuits. The shriek of the V-12! The cop sirens wailing! The absurdly sped-up film! For a generation of car fans, The Cannonball Run (1981) was the movie experience of a lifetime. While it was, of course, fiction, the film was based on fact: a real illegal cross-country race created in the 1970s by the car journalist Brock Yates, who also got a screenplay credit on the movie. Not only did The Cannonball Run feature a lineup of smoking cars (Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, Aston Martin DB5, Ferrari 308 GTS, the Countach, etc.), it also featured a galaxy of the era’s greatest stars (Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Terry Bradshaw, Jackie Chan, and Roger Moore at the height of his 007 fame).
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“When that movie came out, I probably went a dozen times to see it,” recalls Je Ippoliti, a Florida lawyer and owner of the Chatham Inn in Cape Cod. “I loved the whole movie, but it was that car [the Countach] that continued to bring me back. It looked like a spaceship.”
Ippoliti never dreamed he would see the Cannonball Run Countach in person. In 2004, he started the Celebration Exotic Car Festival in Daytona Beach, a charity event, with his brother. He had heard that the Cannonball Run Countach was owned by Ron Rice, founder of Hawaiian Tropic, who lived in Florida. Ippoliti networked his way onto the phone with Rice, who promised to have the car delivered to the show.
“When the car showed up, it was like seeing my favorite movie star,” Ippoliti says. “The person who brought it told me Ron was thinking about selling it. So I called him and said, ‘Look, I’ve dreamed about this car my whole life. I would love to buy it.’ That started a two-year negotiation. I bought the car and put it in a two-year restoration, which was done by Tony Ierardi.”
