That was the appeal of the Diablo. It wasn’t for the faint-hearted: it was a beast to be tamed by a real man

Some said it was a dinosaur from the start. The size of it, the lack of visibility, the outrageous straight-line speed and the, er, challenging handling. Lamborghini was in trouble when it started on the Diablo, the successor to the long-in-the-tooth Countach, and in too many ways it showed.

But the Diablo also had plenty going for it. The V12 was the centrepiece of its appeal, a 500bhp monster developed from the magnificent engine that had powered the great Lamborghinis; the Miura and the Countach among them. The phenomenal noise it made was as politically incorrect as the car itself, and that’s always what the Diablo was about: an old-school devil of a car that was as intoxicating as it was infuriating.

 Lamborghini, at the time financed by the Swiss-based Mimram brothers, had commissioned Marcello Gandini, creator of the Miura and the Countach, to design the new model. But in 1987 Chrysler, headed by Italo-American Lee Iacocca, bought Lamborghini, providing enough money to complete the development of the Diablo. Chrysler bosses weren’t impressed with Gandini’s designs and eventually Chrysler’s own design studio in the USA made extensive changes, smoothing the sharp edges and corners of Gandini’s version. Gandini was famously unimpressed.

The car that emerged certainly looked very different from the Countach. Its cab-forward design was reminiscent of the Group C race cars of the era, but under the skin the design was Countach, even though the spaceframe chassis was now produced in square tubing rather than round (this allowed fixings to be more easily attached). A body built mostly from composites and aluminium alloy gave great structural strength, but the restrictions of using such an old basic structure, plus more modern-day marketing requirements for air conditioning and electric windows that wound right down, meant that the Diablo weighed more than the Countach and its rivals. Remarkably, it was also two inches wider than even the girthsome Ferrari Testarossa.

Did any of this matter? When the Diablo was launched, it wasn’t the size or the weight that attracted the headlines, it was the power and the 202mph top speed. What a machine! It was the fastest genuine production car in the world.

So how did Diablo owners get on? Well, they mostly found the interior a little cramped, particularly in the narrow offset footwells, and access under the scissor doors and over the sills was hardly easy. The air conditioning wasn’t much use, the switchgear was fairly randomly placed, the dashboard horrifically ugly and the rearward visibility hopeless.

Despite the width of the rear tyres, fast getaways in the early rear-wheel-drive Diablos were often marred either by the highly tuned engine bogging down or by the tyres smoking themselves into oblivion, to the point that it was usually impossible to give the Diablo full throttle until it was into third gear, by which time it was already hitting well over 70mph. The gearshift wasn’t one to be rushed, either.

But of course that was (and is) the appeal of the Diablo. It wasn’t for the faint-hearted: it was a beast to be tamed by a real man. It was at least well behaved in many other ways, that fabulous engine given a new efficiency and civility with multi-point fuel injection and engine management rather than the old carburettors or Bosch K-Jetronic fuel injection.

And so over the following years the reputation of the Diablo grew and, even under the shadow of newer, lighter, faster supercars, the Lamborghini remained the supercar with the mad glint in its devilish headlights.

The four-wheel-drive version, the VT, that had been planned from the outset, tamed the traction and the handling issues, but in the background there remained the same old problem: finance. Chrysler’s involvement had never seemed logical, and unsurprisingly the ungainly American behemoth lost interest in the feisty, time-consuming Latins.

A new owner emerged, the Indonesian investment group Megatech, with Lotus stalwart Mike Kimberley at the helm. It wasn’t a long-lived relationship – but then who should come along but the most level-headed Germans of all the car world, the extremely sensible Audi boys. Sure, they’d created the barmy quattro; but Audi and Lamborghini? It seemed a curious marriage back in 1998.