I Just Spent $50,000 Fixing My Lamborghini Countach

This is Doug DeMuro and the Countach is back. My Lamborghini Countach has returned from a $50,000 service. It is not sitting here currently because it is at my house because I have been driving it so much after it got back from the service. As many of you know, I bought a Lamborghini Countach a few months ago. The car has been largely dormant for the last couple of years. And so I sent it out for a service to get things freshened again. And the total bill was $49,127. Let's talk about what it needed. Before we get into this, I wanna introduce today's sponsor, BetterHelp, which is a mental health platform that connects you with a licensed therapist who's trained to provide unbiased, professional, valuable help. Mental health and therapy are tremendously important to me. I have family members in the mental health space and I truly believe in therapy and its ability to create successful outcomes and improve lives. I really, truly do. And BetterHelp is a great way to start the journey. First, go to BetterHelp and use my link, betterhelp.com slash Demuro, which is in the description below. Answer a few questions and BetterHelp will match you with a professional who has experience dealing with struggles just like yours. You can do it all on a computer, on a phone call, on video chat or messaging, however you feel most comfortable. If you're anxious about seeing a therapist, this is the easiest possible way to start the process, to start talking to a therapist, to start improving your mental health. Once you sign up, BetterHelp will match you with a therapist, usually within 48 hours, so you can get started fast. And again, you can do it from the comfort of your own home, your office, in your car, at work, on lunchtime, anything to help see a therapist and start a positive change. Visit betterhelp.com slash Demuro or select Doug DeMuro during signup and enjoy a special discount on the first month with BetterHelp. Okay, so my Countach. The basic backstory is this. This car was essentially sold new in the United States. Back in that era, Countaches in general were not sold new in the United States. They were sold in Italy and then they were imported to the United States because Lamborghini didn't have like official channels to bring them in. It doesn't matter. Regardless, in about 85, the car was sold new. To a guy named Jim in Virginia, who had it from 1985 all the way until 2020. So he owned it for 35 years, which is tremendously impressive. And Jim, during his ownership, he had a big service done to the car back in 2005 when it was 20 years old, but that was 19 years ago. And it hadn't really had much servicing since then. So I bought the car. I knew it needed a bunch of servicing since the last major service had been almost 20 years ago. And so I bought it. I shipped it to California. It was in Canada. I imported it. I shipped it to California. It was quite a process. I drove it about 430 miles. I wanted to give it a shakedown, kind of see, hey, what's going on with it? What does it need? What do I think it needs? How does it feel? You know, that kind of thing. And then I sent it off knowing that it would need the service. I sent it off to the man himself. Now, the man is George Evans. Evans runs Evans Automotive Repair in Columbus, Ohio, which is the most unassumingly named business in the entire planet. Evans Automotive Repair. Oh, do you work on, can you work on Ikea Spectra, Evans? No. Evans is probably the best known vintage Lamborghini shop in the entire country. The shop I use for my Carrera GT is in Connecticut. The shop I use for my Countach is in Ohio. I live in California. How did this happen? I don't know. Why can't these guys move to Cal? Look, look, it's sunny. Not right here, but generally it's sunny. Come on, George, Jimmy, move, move to Southern Cal. Anyway, okay, so I sent the Countach to Evans for two reasons. Number one, they have a great reputation. Like I said, one of the premier vintage Lamborghini shops in the country, if not the world. They are tremendously well-known. People from all over North America send their cars to Columbus, Ohio to be worked on by Evans Automotive. But number two, the other big reason I sent it to Evans is they had actually performed the major service on the car back in 2005. So all the work that they had done, it's not like they would remember it, although they did in fact remember the prior owner, but it's not like they remembered every nut they tightened. But I figured, hey, you know, they did the work then, they should do the work again. It makes sense to kind of have this continuation of care since Evans is still in business. And they were, not only are they still in business, but consistently over that time, agreed to be a fantastic operator with a great business. So the car went off to Ohio. That was the beginning of December. I sent it off, my wife was due with our second baby December, you know, eight-ish, 15, somewhere around there. He was born on the 11th. And I figured I wouldn't be using the car for a little while with a toddler and an infant. So I sent it off to Evans and I figured, hey, look, you know, I need a lot of stuff done. I'm not sure what it's gonna be, but the car hasn't been serviced for a long time. Off it went to Ohio and I budgeted $50,000 for the service in my mind, for freshening up the car that had been sitting for 20 years and guess what? $49,000. I came out ahead. So what did it need? Well, the car had only driven in the last 18 years, 3,000 total miles. Apparently Jim, who had bought the car new, he drove it a lot when he was younger, but kind of as he got older, he eventually got sick. He wasn't using the car as often. And so me taking delivery of it and then driving it 430 miles in the first two months I owned it, that exposed a few issues. You know, the car had not been used a lot and then I used it a lot. There was a noisy fan that was making some sounds. One of the headlights wasn't working. The dome light was broken. An oil sending unit had failed. And more importantly, most importantly, second gear was grinding when I was shifting into it. And that's the trouble spot. Dome light's not working, you can keep going. Second gear is grinding, you don't have that long. So the transmission grinding was our biggest issue and our biggest priority because it was at the point where basically I could no longer get second gear. And so Evans had to pull out the engine and transmission. They pulled it out of the car. It is one giant unit that basically hoists out the engine bay up out of the car at a 90 degree angle. It's absolutely ridiculous. It's an amazing thing to see it come out, as you can see. And it's just one big, massive unit that's basically as long as the car. And it's just insane that it all comes out. So they took out the engine transmission and the issue turned out to be a slider coupler for the transmission from second to third gear, plus gear synchros, which wear quickly in these cars. Now, just those two things and just for the parts was $7,800. And then you had the labor of pulling out the engine and transmission, reassembling everything, putting it all back in. That alone was about $16,000 to $18,000 of the entire job. But the car's back, I've been driving it. Second gear works perfectly. Third gear works perfectly. I have new gear synchros in every gear. Every transmission part was removed and cleaned, probably for the very first time since the car was built in Italy 41 years ago. We changed the transmission fluid. It was basically a full transmission service, not quite a rebuild, but a full service and replacement of worn stuff and just a vast improvement. It was a big deal for a car like this. Now, I was obviously expecting that wouldn't be the only issue and indeed it was not. And so I'm just gonna basically go through the big items that I did. One, new tires. There are apparently two tires that fit the Countach. There are original looking tires that look old, just like the originals. And Pirelli only makes those tires in occasional runs every few years. Or you can buy a new set of Pirelli P Zero tires that don't look old, but they are just new tires. And we couldn't get access to any new tires that look old. I guess that run hasn't been made in a while. So I just went with new tires that look new. Personally, I don't really care what the tire looks like. I care that it's functional. That's a big theme in my automotive ownership. And so I said, put on good new tires, even if they don't look retro. I don't know why the look of a tire even matters to people, but it does to something. So did that, put on new tires with modern date codes as opposed to tires from 2016 or 2015. That totaled about $3,000 before labor. There was a full valve adjustment done on the car. That was about $2,000. We rebuilt the carburetors. That was over $2,000. I had to replace the headliner. If you watched my early video with the car, you'll notice the headliner's kind of sagging and getting in my head, like on top of my head. Had to get it replaced. The headliner in a Countach, amazingly, when it's in the factory, is put on before the windshield. So you take some real skill to put a headliner on. That cost over $2,100 to do. I replaced the radiators. And actually, this is where kind of the service starts to get into the personal preference stuff because Evans Automotive is a really honest shop. And they basically told me, look, your radiators are working fine. The factory radiators the car has are working fine, but they're 40 years old. And now we can have better ones made with brand new cores that will last longer and cool the car down faster. But they said, hey, look, you don't have to replace them because yours are working great. And I'm a big fan of keeping the car as reliable as possible. And I don't want to ship the car to Ohio again anytime soon. At the end of the day, it costs about three grand to ship the car there and three grand to ship the car back. And so my view was, let's get done as much stuff as we can while the car is there. So I said, replace them. Even if it's not needed today, it's not puking coolant, let's get them replaced before it is so I don't have to send it back there or figure out how to service it here. That was another $4,000. Same story with the muffler. Evans called and said, hey, look, there's some slight rust on the muffler. Not a big deal, but it will continue obviously. And it's, you know, eventually it'll rattle and cause other issues and no big deal, but there is there. And I said, replace it, especially while parts are available. That's another thing. You never know when you're not going to be able to find Countach radiators, newly remade with new cores, or, you know, a new muffler for a Countach. I didn't replace it. That was about $4,000. And then there was a bunch of little stuff that added up. 12 new spark plugs, $212. An oil change was 319 in labor, 224 in parts. Not so bad, actually. 600 bucks for an oil change in a Countach. Replace brake fluid is about $400. Recharge the air conditioner and add Freon, another few hundred. Replace 12 new carburetor jets, about 400 bucks. Transmission mounts, 800 bucks. The list goes on and on. And all of these things lead us to a total of around $44,000, then plus tax. New headlight, new dome light, all that stuff. So, for the people who are quick to say, I told you so. You bought a Countach, it was going to be unreliable. Wait, wait. I knew that this was coming when I bought the car. I bought the car knowing it had been sitting for a long time. It was going to need some serious servicing. I don't consider this like a breakdown where the car messed up and I needed to send it out for servicing or else it was going to cause problems. That wasn't really my thought. All of this was totally planned for and I mentally worked it into the price of the car when I bought it. And from this point, I've talked to a lot of Countach owners who basically tell me, hey, if you maintain the cars well, they will reward you. If you maintain the cars and you use the cars, they will reward you and you can actually get some time in between these services and some miles in between these services. And this car had a lot of deferred maintenance going back a long period of time, but now I've made huge progress in getting it back going and getting it back totally right. And I've driven the car maybe about a hundred miles since it came back from service and it's been fantastic, absolutely magical. Does this mean that the car is unreliable, a car that needs 50 grand in servicing? It needs work. I mean, the car's 41 years old. It's an Italian car that was made in a situation where the design, the style of the car was the primary motivator, not the function of how it performed. And so there were definitely corners cut. There were definitely bizarre decisions made back in the day. And I'll tell you, Evans Automotive makes strides in actually improving some of these cars with modern technology and modern thought. But you just kind of got to keep on top of it. I don't think that this service necessarily makes the car any less reliable than other cars of its day that are high performance, high revving, specially built by hand types of vehicles. It's just kind of the way it is. And so you just have to stay on top of it. And I will say, I'm happy at least that this car was owned by one person for many, many, many years. And it never got to a point where it was being passed around while Countaches got cheap in the early 2000s for not that much money and people were cutting corners on service. At least the guy who had it before me, he deferred some maintenance, but he did maintain it well while he was using it. Now, whether I can reliably count on this maintenance I've done to last, I guess we'll find out. But I will say, overall, so far, I am absolutely thrilled with my Countach. I don't have any plans to add any other cars to my stable of automobiles right now, but I often do think if I had to sell something, just one car, it would be the Carrera GT before the Countach, which is sacrilege. I've pined after this car my whole life. Obviously, it drives a lot better than the Countach, but the Countach is just such a thrill. Every time I take it out, it is a totally different life experience than anything you will ever have at any other point. And it's just cool. And now that the servicing is done, we'll see how it goes. Now, as for what other cars I want, people always ask me, what are you gonna get next? And like I said, I am not planning on adding anything else to my cars. I have a new daily driver coming, I'm selling a few cars. I'm not adding any fun enthusiast supercar type vehicles. That is over. I spent $49,000 on maintenance and servicing for this car, the Carrera GT, and then another $49,000 on the Countach. I had significant headaches getting both cars titled and registered and getting the other cars sold. And I'm currently doing a big addition to my house. I just had a new baby, like I mentioned. I do not have the mental energy to add more cars or have more big service tickets with the cars I have. I am good. Daily drivers, sure, you know, maybe they come and go over the next little while, but no more fun, exciting supercars. I have an amazing collection of these three. I truly believe I have the three best in the sense that I have the most usable and drivable in the Ford GT. I have the greatest driver's car of all time in the Carrera GT, and I have the most exotic and insane in the Countach. And those three check a lot of boxes, and I really don't want to mess with anything else. So there you go. I'm going to start really enjoying what I have, especially now that the Countach is back from a major, major service. And now you know how it went. Let's see how it does from here.