Lamborghini is rebuilding the 1971 Countach prototype

The official Automobili Lamborghini SpA YouTube channel has published ‘The Wait: Chapter 2’ where we discover some artisans putting together a massive V12 engine of what seems to be a Countach model … but there is something strange to be seen when they lower the engine into the body, take a closer look at the video below, especially from 48 seconds on:

That isn’t a Countach LP400 body, note the fins behind the side window, that’s the 1971 Countach LP500 prototype body, but wait … history mentions the Countach prototype was used for crash testing at Mira in the UK and the car was subsequently scrapped … is history wrong then? There is something odd about the crash test, in fact, knowing the Countach LP500 prototype wasn’t built on a round tube space frame, why crash test it when the production model isn’t the same, they would have to do another test with an actual production version right? Whatever happened, we have a very rare photo of the 1971 Countach prototype after the crash test:

So it was heavily damaged at the front as can be seen in the photo above, but what happened with the car after that? Upon further investigation, it turned out the crash test car had the dashboard removed together with the seats, and what was left on the inside seemed to have been painted white unlike the all-black interior seen on the prototype during testing … but did the 1971 Countach prototype (which didn’t have a chassis number by the way) come back to Sant’Agata after the crash?

And this Chapter 2 video shows another hint as to why we’re possibly looking at a restoration of the 1071 Countach LP500 … the engine comes with gold-finished covers, while the LP400 V12 unit had these in black, now there aren’t too many color photos of the actual 1971 5-Liter V12 engine, but we happened to have one in our gallery, and it had those gold covers back in 1971 already.

A detail we can’t really distinguish from this video is the number of distributors, note on the photo of the original 5-Liter V12 engine there is only one distributor for all 12 spark plugs, for the 4-Liter LP400 V12 engine Lamborghini switched to two distributors, one for each bank of six cylinders, it’s only when Lamborghini created the LP500 S with a more or less 5-Liter engine the single distributor came back.

According to Mira, the Countach has only been crash-tested in March 1974, which might be correct as the above photo shows the heavily modified photo undamaged as late as September 1973, so has Lamborghini been hiding the Countach LP500 remains for 50 years or has the wreck been discovered somewhere in a scrap yard? There is no official information about that as of yet, but I already noticed it when they released the first ‘The Wait‘ video, and this Chapter 2 confirms it for me: Automobili Lamborghini has rebuilt the 1971 Countach LP500 prototype, either from scratch or from the wrecked remains, whichever is the case, this will be an amazing piece of automotive history and I can’t wait for them to unveil it.