Devil worship

Getting my hands on the keys to this baby changed my life.

I grew up loving Lamborghini: the outspoken Italian marque that first appeared at the Turin Motor Show in 1963, one year after I was born.

Like Concorde, there is never anything average or politically correct about a Lamborghini. The cars are sexual and uncompromising, with shattering exhaust notes, astonishing horizontality and brazen good looks. In the ’60s and ’70s they were enjoyed by the rich and groovy. Twiggy’s manager cruised the King’s Road in a lime green Miura, the only car ever designed with eyelashes.

Ferruccio Lamborghini, the company’s founder, was a wealthy businessman who studied industrial arts in Bologna before amassing a fortune building tractors from scrap. He had a passion for powerful cars and, like many creatively arrogant Italians of his generation, disdained the opinions of others. Instead, he worked with a talented coterie who shared his singular vision of a definitive supercar.

Ferruccio employed Marcello Gandini to design his lineage of road legal race cars. Gandini became Bertone’s chief designer in 1965, replacing the celebrated Giugiaro. In 1971 he created a Lamborghini that made Pininfarina’s Ferrari Testarossa look like a fleet car—it was called the Countach.

While Lamborghini’s rampaging bull badge poked fun at Ferrari’s prancing horse in reality the car wasn’t all that it promised to be. It was gorgeous and powerful but handled like a bull, with heavy controls and capricious roadholding. It was the archetypal man’s car and Rod Stewart was a serial owner.

Twenty-eight years of incremental change ensured the Countach endured as the image of the definitive supercar. It remained special, not for what is actually was, but for what it could be and wanted to be, and for what it has now become. Today, under Audi’s stewardship, the legend has matured into the reengineered Lamborghini Diablo—the car Gandini always meant it to be.

The Diablo takes its signature silhouette from Gandini’s original Countach. It’s a triumph of styling; yesterday’s stealth bomber with a super-low profile, proto-diamond-cut fuselage, gull-winged doors and brutal sculptural beauty. A host of improvements including a revised chassis and suspension systems, ABS and a wider and lighter carbon body conspire with the new six litre V12 550bhp engine to recreate the supercar for the third millennium.

New technology has finally delivered the dream, civilising the bull without taming it. Driving the Diablo is an occasion in itself. In town it’s a shockingly usable crowd pleaser that won’t embarrass you by being difficult to reverse park. Stick the Diablo in second and take it anywhere, third gear takes you everywhere else, if you can afford the petrol. Inside, there’s no space for shopping or anything else, nor would you want there to be. It fills every part of your brain with more excitement than it’s immediately possible to comprehend. The four-wheel drive (Viscous Tracking in Lambo-lingo), delivers awesome stability as you feed it limitless helpings of creamy, cataclysmic power. On the open road the Diablo handles with calculated ferocity and huge enthusiasm. Like Robbie Williams it pulls in any gear. If you’re man enough to give it its head and shift the stick it will charge from 0–62 in 3.56 seconds before warping to an outrageous 205 mph accompanied by a soundtrack and price tag of biblical dimensions. I can’t stop grinning. The Diablo is the ultimate, unforgettable, infernal combustion experience. I could never get tired of this. It really is this good.

Now ravished by the new Diablo I feel rather desolate, although short of selling my flat, at £156,000 it’s beyond my reach. But everyone should have something absurd that they crave, a fabulous addiction or an unreasonable desire. Mine will remain a not-so-secret lifelong love affair with the exotic Italian beast I waited so long to drive.