Lamborghini Countach LP500S

The Countach arrived in 1974 as the successor to the Miura and immediately made every other supercar look old. Marcello Gandini's design for Bertone was a folded-paper wedge with scissor doors, almost no rear visibility, and a mid-mounted V12 turned back-to-front so the gearbox sat between the seats. The LP500S, built from 1982 to 1985, ran a 4.75 litre V12 producing around 375 horsepower, with a claimed top speed near 290 km/h. Roughly 320 LP500S cars were made.

For a toy line about disguise, a Countach is a spectacularly poor choice, which is precisely why it works. Sideswipe and Sunstreaker are the line's showboats, brothers written as brawler and narcissist, and nothing says narcissist like a car that cannot see out of the back. The scissor doors also solve a design problem: they hinge upward and become the robot's shoulders.

The mould is the busiest in G1. The same basic body produced Sideswipe, Red Alert (with a light bar), Generation 2 Sideswipe, Tigertrack, Deep Cover and Clamp Down. Sunstreaker is a separate but related tooling with a wide-body kit, and fans have argued for decades about whether it copies a specific Japanese custom Countach rather than a factory car. Both toys are heavy with die-cast, and both have a fragile shoulder joint that has aged badly.

Diaclone Car Robot No. 8 'New Countach LP500S' (Sideswipe) and the related 'Countach LP500S Super Tuning' body used for Sunstreaker (Takara, 1982 to 1983). The same Sideswipe tooling was retooled with roof lights as the Diaclone 'New Countach LP500S Police Car', which Hasbro then redecoed into Red Alert.

Fan lore about these vehicles is unusually unreliable. Where a popular claim does not survive checking, it is recorded here rather than repeated.

• Sunstreaker's donor car. Fan research points at a customised Countach photographed in a Japanese car magazine rather than any factory model; Takara has never confirmed it.
• Whether Lamborghini ever contacted Hasbro or Takara about the 1984 toys. No documented correspondence exists; the sticker changes are the only evidence anything happened.