Yahoo Autos The Lamborgini Countach Name Started Out as a Joke
Throughout the years, the word Countach has been translated as "cool," "awesome" or "wow" by the British press, which is fairly accurate-the word is sort of an exclamation, used to convey a sense of astonishment or wonder. Most people who know this learned it from a 2003 episode of Top Gear, in which presenter James May called the word "a bit of Italian slang," that "translates roughly as 'Whoa!'"
Problem is, it's not really Italian. It's Piedmontese.
Piedmontese is a Romance language spoken by around three million people in Piedmont, the northwestern region of Italy. Back in 1971, Lamborghini employed a man with roots in Piedmont, working alongside Marcello Gandini and Bob Wallace to build the yellow show car that would become the Countach.
Bertone's concepts were functional, which meant long hours for the teams building them. Following its 1971 debut at the Geneva Motor Show, the Countach took an additional four years to make production ready, during which time Ferruccio Lamborghini sold off his company to Georges-Henri Rossetti and René Leimer. But the name of the car was devised long before the crowd could see Gandini's design.
But why did Lamborghini break away from its tradition of naming cars after famous bulls? As Gandini explains in this newly-published interview with Lamborghini, Countach stated out as a joke. But since it sounded so good in English, they just went with it.
"When we made cars for the car shows, we worked at night," Gandini said. "We were all tired, so we would joke around to keep our morale up." The man tasked with fine-parts work, like making the door lock mechanisms, was a six-foot-six man with giant hands who almost exclusively spoke Piedmontese. "One of his most frequent exclamations was 'countach,' which literally means plague, contagion," Gandini said. "[It's] actually used more to express amazement or even admiration, like 'goodness.'" One late night, Gandini joked that they should name the car "countach." He turned to Bob Wallace to ask how it would sound to an English speaker. "He said it in his own way, strangely," Gandini said. "It worked. We immediately came up with the writing and stuck it on."
Crazy? Certainly not. But one could argue that the whole process was very Countach.
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