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Rare early Lamborghini Countach sells for record $1.2 million

Lamborghini may have made headlines with the highly exclusive, $4.5-million Veneno and the even more expensive Veneno Roadster that followed, but when it comes to classics sold at auction, their prices seldom approach the kind of figures attained by rare classics made by arch-rival Ferrari. Early 350 GTs and rare Miuras (like the SV prototype Gooding sold a few years ago for a record $1.7 million) have been known to breach the seven-figure mark, but now the Countach is making its way into the big leagues as well.
Pictured here is a rather exceptional early example sold by Bonhams in Connecticut last week. This 1975 Lamborghini Countach LP400 "Periscopica" - so dubbed for the unique rearview mirror fitted to the first 150 examples made - has just over 10,000 miles on the odometer. With flawlessly retouched Blu Tahiti (read: French racing blue) paint and an immaculate deep tan leather interior, the Periscopica was the subject of feverish bidding before selling for $1.2 million to a buyer present at the auction, beating out a dozen or so telephone bidders.
The record price for a Countach trumps the previous record, also set by Bonhams at the Quail Lodge last August, where another '75 Periscopica sold for $836,000. The rising prices surely reflect the coming of age for the Countach, now nearly 40 years since its introduction - particularly for the generation that grew up idolizing it as the prototypical supercar. Scope it out in the artful gallery of 76 high-resolution images above and the details of the auction below.

Watch an Aventador, Viper and LFA play the songs of their people

Our friends at Road & Track recently stopped by Cars and Coffee in Irvine, California, with the 2013 SRT Viper and found themselves a place to park between a Lamborghini Aventador and a Lexus LFA. Those machines might as well be the three musketeers of ludicrous exhaust notes, and rather than keep those 24 raging cylinders muffled, R&T set about conducting an orchestra of internal combustion. On seeing these three lined up, we were more than prepared to call the Viper victorious when it came to tickling our ear drums, but the latest domestic V10 sounds down right civilized in this company.
If we're picking favorites, we have to say the LFA takes the cake. There's something about the noise of a street-legal V10 that can wrap it's tachometer all the way to 9,000 rpm that turns our knees to quivering dollops of jelly. Check out the clip below for a listen. We shouldn't need to tell you to get frisky with the volume.

Another Lamborghini Veneno for sale, this time for only $8m

There are some cars you expect to see coming up for sale often in the used car listings. Civics, RAV4s, F-150s... you know, the kind of car that they build by the thousand, build to sell, and build to last. More attention-grabbing for us, though, is when we see multiples of a rarer model coming up time and again in the same place. Like the Lamborghini Veneno, for example. The factory in Sant'Agata only made three of these coupes for public consumption, and each of them sold for about $4 million. So we were surprised when we saw one pop up on Mobile.de with a whopping $11 million price tag. But we were even more surprised to see another one for sale on the same site, just weeks later. Pictured with red details (instead of white like the last one), this example is listed as the first of the three made, with only 100 kilometers (62 miles) on the odometer. Its owner is asking ˆ7.1 million – equivalent to nearly $8 million at current exchange rates. That's about twice what Lamborghini charged in the first place, four times what it charged more recently for the new Centenario, and twenty times the price of the Aventador on which they're all based. But it's still a heck of a lot less than the $11 million asked for the last one. Of course, the seller can ask for however much he or she wants, but actually getting that price is quite another matter. Part of us gets the feeling that if someone were really that interested, the listings wouldn't still be up for weeks now. The other part is surprised some squillionaire somewhere in the world hasn't ponied up an even $20 million to take both home already. Related Video: