Wednesday, 1 July 2026. Welcome back to another instalment of Cardle of the Day, the series where we work through each morning’s puzzle at Cardle and then spend a few words celebrating whatever car the game decided to throw at us. And today was an infuriating one!
If you haven’t played Cardle before, the premise is beautifully simple: one car, five photo clues, each one progressively less cropped than the last. You can guess at any point or skip a clue to reveal a little more of the image. Nail it on clue one and you’re a legend. Need all five and you’re still in good company. Or, even if you get it right first try, the game might just misbehave and not give you the win. Yes, I said it can be infuriating.
When you’re dealing with a car as recognisable as the Countach, there are very few angles that a car person would look at and not get it right first try, so I bet most of those playing went through the same journey Matthew and myself did, which was “Yeah, got it” immediately to “Wait, what?”. Once that happens, I usually just skip all guesses and confirm my suspicions. Get used to it, it will happen often. Now, back to the Countach!
There are cars that defined a decade, and then there is this Lambo, a car that defined what a supercar was supposed to look like for the better part of two decades. Designed by Marcello Gandini at Bertone, it was first shown as a concept at the 1971 Geneva Motor Show under the name LP 500, and it entered production in 1974 as the LP 400. The name itself, Countach, is a Piedmontese exclamation of astonishment, which tells you everything about the reaction it was designed to provoke.
Production ran until 1990, by which point the car had evolved through several iterations, gaining wider arches, a larger engine, and enough aerodynamic addenda that made it look even more like something I had drawn on the back of a school notebook. The image of scissor doors flung open, wedge profile cutting the air became the poster on a million bedroom walls through the 1980s.
A few facts worth knowing about this legend: the final production variant, the 25th Anniversary Edition, was introduced in 1988 to mark Lamborghini’s 25 years as a manufacturer, and featured revised bodywork by Horacio Pagani (yep, that Pagani) who was working at Lamborghini at the time. The LP 500 S variant, introduced in 1982, used a 4,754 cc V12 producing around 375 bhp, pushing the car to a claimed top speed of 182 mph.
Lamborghini then revived the nameplate in 2021 with the Countach LPI 800-4, a limited run hybrid built to mark the company’s 60th anniversary. You could call it a lazy cash grab and unworthy of carrying the name of the legend the Countach – I know I will. Out of the 112 units, one lives here in NZ, and all sold before the car was even publicly revealed.
It would be easy to dismiss the Countach as pure theatre: all drama, no substance, but that misses the point. The car genuinely pushed what was possible in terms of packaging, aerodynamics, and visual language at the time. Its influence runs through virtually every wedge shaped supercar that followed it, and its scissor doors became a Lamborghini signature.
If Cardle is going to keep throwing these bugged guesses our way, at least make them around incredible cars such as the Countach. See you for the next one!
