Want to hear something interesting? I started writing this review about three paragraphs down from here. That tells something about the development focus of the Lamborghini Diablo.
From its inception, Lamborghini Automobili Spa. had one goal: to compete with Ferrari; in fact, to beat him at his game. The Miura was the first Lamborghini to push ahead of Ferrari in the development race, to step into the lead and demand recognition. It prompted Ferrari to go from the front-engined generation of the Daytona to the mid-engined boxers, beginning with the 365BB and ending in the 512M, the last of the Testarossa series.
The Miura competed directly against Ferrari's Daytona. The Countach competed directly against Ferrari's 512BB and Testarossa. But when the Diablo was developed -- well, the Testarossa was there. But it doesn't really compare to the Diablo. The Diablo had to beat only one car -- the Countach. This fact was so clear to the press, the designers, and to me, that comparison with the Ferrari seems an afterthought.
The Diablo's designers had a tough act to follow. The team, led by Marcello Gandini, was faced with creating a worthy successor to one of Italy's automotive legends. It goes without saying that the new car had to exceed the original in every way, or the critics would be merciless.
The job was further complicated by the fact that Lamborghini had been bought by Lee Iacocca's rejuvenated Chrysler Corporation. The Italian automaker was Chrysler's new showpiece, a trophy they wanted to show off. So, to emphasize their ownership, they insisted on getting their corporate hands into the Diablo's birth process.
Two things mitigated in the Diablo's favor. The first was that the Countach, while credited to Disegno di Bertone, had in fact been designed by Gandini while he worked there. The second was that Chrysler, rather than being a burden, actually brought to the process a whole pile of money and not a little talent of their own. As it turned out, their influences on the Diablo were minor, but significant: the models were given aerodynamic tuning in a first-rate wind tunnel facility, and they ensured that it would be US-ready, with a driving position comfortable for a six-foot-tall, ninety-fifth percentile American man. (Hmm. I'm six feet tall. Coincidence? or...?)
So when the Diablo emerged from wraps the relationship to its famous predecessor was obvious: the almost identical trunk (in front), leading into the similar windshield, slightly rounded in the wind tunnel. The vertical-lifting, scissors-type doors. The air intakes, low along the rocker panels. The extended rear buttresses, festooned with vents, framing a tiny rear window. The massive Pirelli P7 steamrollers.
If you carved a Countach out of soap, and immersed it face-forward for a while in a stream of warm water, what emerged would be very like a Diablo. The vents, rather than being tacked on, as in the Countach, were an integral part of the design from the beginning. The many sharply creased corners of the Countach were all radiused into curves. The side mirrors were slightly changed, the wheels slightly elaborated. The famous rear wing was replaced with a smaller, more subtle one.
In fact, that wing nicely characterizes the transformation. On the Countach (when it WAS on the Countach) it was huge and garish, outrageously daring anyone to say the car didn't deserve it. Sure, it created downforce. But it created enough drag to lop off, say, a good ten miles per hour from the car's top speed. People didn't care. The owners would almost never push the car to its top speed anyway. They wanted to see the wing -- more important, they wanted everyone to see the wing. It made the car's character. So, while the wing was always optional, more Countaches were sold with it than without.
By contrast, the wing on the Diablo is almost an afterthought. Not in a design sense -- in that respect, it's better integrated than its predecessor. No, the whole point of the original wing was that it WAS outrageous, it did stand out, and it made the car outrageous. The Diablo's wing is smaller, smoother, and follows the contours of the car -- when it has a wing. More Diablos are sold wingless than winged, and that's how we expect to see them.
And that somehow sums it up. The Diablo, fast as it is (202 mph, about 20 faster than the Countach!), and wicked-looking as it is, has lost something to its progenitor. Something that's difficult to define, but it might be outrageousness. It's too smooth, too aerodynamic, too civilized. Too developed.
Is it Chrysler's fault? Maybe. It was their wind tunnel, their insistence. But I really think it's just time and technology. The Countach was right for 1980. Even when it was first shown in 1972, it was right for 1980. The Diablo was right for 1990, for 1995. We're all a little more developed, a little more technological. And we lose our rough edges. Get civilized.
So sure, it's a better car. It's a better package for hauling two people at insanely high speeds. But the Countach is a better statement, a better show-stopper.
Enough philosophy. Next to my black Polistil Countach sits my Maisto Lamborghini Diablo. Its color is a brilliant, screaming yellow, the first thing you see from across the room. Let's see what Maisto did with Gandini's design, with Lamborghini's (and Chrysler's) aerodynamic bullet.
The shape is right. That's pretty easy to see. It's there, and if it's not as outrageous as the Countach, it's still plenty mean-lookin. One of the things that first caught my eye in the early photos is easy to see here: the simple lateral vents on the engine lid of the Countach have changed on the Diablo. They're split down the middle, and angled. It's not a functional change, purely cosmetic, but it ties in nicely with the Diablo name. The effect is positively reptilian.
The other vents are all there, from the tiny NACA ducts on the trunklid to the huge air intakes in the buttresses. Like Ferrari's F40, the abundant openings remind us how important airflow management is at 200 mph.
But let's start at the beginning: the front end. The bumper has two indicator lights, with orange lenses. Below the bumper, in the air dam, are found two untinted driving lights. These lights all look bad. Maisto fastened them by projecting a piece of plastic through a hole in the sheetmetal, and that projection conducts light inside. To us, it conducts dark out, showing as a distinct black spot near the lens' center. They would have done better to use two projections, one at each end of the lens.
The Lamborghini decal on the hood looks pretty good, at least. Not like Polistil's Countach, where it's twice the size it should be. The hood opens to show a tiny trunk, with a spare tire nestled -- well, let's say wedged -- inside. The trunk is about the size of the tire, maybe a little smaller, and when I actually took the car apart I was able to remove the spare and verify that it is, indeed, a real model tire. Quite a nice one, too -- a Pirelli Cinturato P7, 205/50VR16, with the correct tread pattern. Take that, Bburago!
Another thing we see looking at the trunklid, when it's open, comes as a surprise: the inside surface is painted, the same blinding yellow as the exterior. After seeing bare metal on the inside surfaces of so many Maistos, it's a nice change.
But let me mention in passing: that's the only good thing about the paint on this car. The general level of paint is really poor: rough edges at nearly every panel end. Heavy "orange peel" texture toward the front. A runnel left on the passenger side door by a rolling drop when the paint was wet. And it thins in several places, the brilliant yellow fading toward green.
(An editorial note here: If Maisto would just pay more attention to the quality of their paint, I think their perceived value would go up tremendously. The models are usually well planned, but a bad paint job can make the best model look cheap.)
Closing the trunklid leads us to the windshield, and its wiper. This wiper is approximately correct in shape, but maybe a little deep, and that leads to a minor problem: it doesn't sit flat on the windshield in its parked position (down). Angling it to the other end (which, unusually, it allows) lets it rest flush on the windshield, but then it blocks the view from the driver's seat. I've read that boundary layer pressure will lift the wiper off a Countach's windshield at 160mph, but not at rest in a parking lot. Oh well...
On to the tiny backlight, the engine lid with its reptilian vents. On my model the engine lid doesn't exactly want to close flush, but it will with some persuasion. On the other hand, it also takes some persuasion to get it to stay fully open. When it does, we can see the massive V12, complete with red spark plug "wires". Here Maisto repeated a mistake: they're molded in a translucent reddish plastic, which they should have at least painted. (They did the same thing on their Viper GTS and Ferrari F50, and probably others.) To add to that, they have a lot of flash from the molding, though it's hard to see how they could trim it in a cost-effective way. Other than that, the engine looks pretty good, as these models go.
Closing the engine lid brings us to the rear of the car. The taillights are pretty good, with only tiny flaws where the orange of one surface overflows onto the red of another. The rear clip shows some vented areas where the ground-effect tunnel curves up to create suction (encouraging airflow through the vents, I assume).
By contrast, the quad tailpipes are pretty bad. Real bad. They are secured to the undersurface of the rear with screws, bright instead of black so presumably we won't notice them. The ends of the pipes aren't hollow at all; they have barely even a token depression to suggest that someone thought they ought to be. And that's covered in the same general chrome.
But there's something else around here, something subtle. The whole lower half of the rear clip is a piece of plastic, and the color match to the paint is admirable. It's odd how, on a car that gets so many details of painting wrong, they get these few things better than usual...
Moving around to the side shows us the rear wheels and tires, and they're huge. Not only that, they're good. Sure, there's a little bit of mold seam down the center of the tread, but it's minimal. Like Bburago's generic tire, the tread pattern is Pirelli P7. Unlike most of Bburago's applications, it's correct for the Diablo. And, definitely unlike the Bburago tires, the tires are square in cross section, rather than "overinflated".
Besides that, the wheels are excellent. And if we check out Maisto's trademark spring suspension here, we'll find another surprise: it's much stiffer than usual, but still springy. Looking inside, we see the reason: not one, but TWO coil springs per tire! Extra credit for that one!
But if we're keeping track of credits, they'll need that one to make up for the doors. Polistil modeled the doors on the Countach cleverly, with a constant spring pressure upward and a tiny plastic catch to keep it closed. Bburago set a spring in the mechanism of the Bugatti EB110's doors, so they'd snap open, or snap closed, whichever is closer. How does Maisto approach the scissors door problem?
Without trying very hard, that's how. The doors, first, don't want to close all the way down, flush. Nor do they want to stay open -- you really have to persuade them. What they want to do is flop inward from their rightful axis, out of alignment with the doorsills. Where both the Bburago (which is a good model of an ugly car) and the Polistil (which is simply not a very good model) have a fine precision about the door's movement, this Diablo's is full of slop.
Besides, the corner where the mirrors are mounted looks rotten, as do the mirrors. I know Maisto can do better than that.
And while we're messing with the doors, let's have a look at the Diablo's interior. Since neither Maisto nor Bburago spend any paint on the interiors, it's surprising how good the console looks. The dash gauge decal is nicely done, and the pedals aren't too bad. The seats themselves look pretty good, but the seatbelts -- well, they stink.
The four-point seatbelts are done in a bright, waxy-looking plastic, without either decals or redeeming value. To make things worse, they're extended as if wrapping around the driver's and passenger's bodies. Now, even if we put figures in the seats, how would we get the seatbelts around them? And without figures, why extend the belts? I'll never know why they don't model the seatbelts in an unused position, but Bburago is guilty of this, too.
Anyway, back to the interior: the shifter is short and stout, unlike the spindly shifters Ferrari uses, and except for a mold seam it looks pretty good. The steering wheel seems to have an airbag in its hub, but the Lamborghini bull emblem there is too big. The steering -- well, that leads me to another complaint:
If you work the front wheels, they turn easily enough. That is, until one of them hits the edge of the fender, and then you can work it around. There's too much slop in the front end, enough that it allows interference to the steering.
But except for that point, the front wheels and tires look as good as the rears.
Finally, a look at the undercarriage: Near the rear of the car, we see the transmission case, the twin-shock rear suspension, and the halfshafts that transmit torque to the driving wheels. At the front, we can see something of the front suspension: the springs are visible, as well as the steering linkage, and the A-arms are outlined on the belly pan.
But that's about it. Most of the underside is featureless, except where it identifies the model. That barely counts as an effort.
In general, this is not a bad model, but the paint is inferior -- even if extensive -- and the doors are a disaster.
To sum it up:
Strengths: Excellent tires, good overall shape, mostly good interior.
Weaknesses: Terrible doors, uneven paint, yucky seatbelts.
Overall: I'm sure there's a better Diablo out there; don't pay too much for this one.
PS: Since this review was written, I have acquired a Diablo by Bburago, and one sold in a box labeled Intex. The Intex is exactly the same as my Maisto, down to the color and the name on the base. They aren't really trying to fool anyone -- the box does say, in small print, that it's made by Maisto.
But the Bburago Diablo is something different. Where the Maisto fails, the Bburago succeeds with jewellike construction and excellent fit and finish. To complicate things further, UT's high-end line, AutoArt, is now offering a model of the 4WD Diablo VT Roadster, with removable "targa" top. Early reports say it's exquisite -- so I'll have to get one of those, too. I may even pick up one of Mira's Diablos, and possibly a Polistil Diablo will come my way. More reviews, and comparisons, will be forthcoming. Stay tuned.
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