If you consider yourself a car buff, you choose with care the films you own up to liking. Steve McQueen’s Le Mans is fine, Herbie Goes Bananas is most certainly not. Name-checking Grand Prix, starring James Garner, will earn you some kudos among the cognoscenti, but not as much as Vanishing Point. And while the Nicolas Cage Gone in 60 Seconds re-make is an absolute no-no, mention the original and you’ll command the bragging rights in any bar full of car movie bores.  So into which category should we slot The Cannonball Run? Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Burt Reynolds driving an ambulance and Roger Moore playing a character who thinks he’s Roger Moore? But before you write it off entirely, think back to the opening sequence, one which I watched for the first time as a 15-year-old boy, jaw in lap.  A black Lamborghini Countach runs fast through the desert in early morning light pursued by a couple of hapless policemen in a marked Pontiac Firebird. Somewhere in the sequence (and perhaps a little improbably) they draw level with the Lambo and start gesticulating at the driver to pull over, whereupon said driver drops a couple of gears and, to the sound of an all-Italian V12 engine at maximum stretch, escapes from the clutches of the law at artillery shell velocity.  Then the ultimate insult: after a brief period hiding, the Countach sneaks back up behind the Firebird as it nears the state border and before the Highway Patrolmen have even realised it’s there, it overtakes again, howling, screaming and shrieking its way across the state line and into Arizona.
The Countach was the original ‘poster car’, adorning the bedrooms of small boys the world over. But is it actually any good? A quarter of a century after it went off sale, Andrew Frankel looks back at this legendary Lambo