A tale of genius and passion, on both sides of the ocean, starring personalities of the calibre of Marcello Gandini and Lee Iacocca: the heir of the Countach was not only the fastest production car ever built until that time, but was also what it took to transform the brand from Sant’Agata Bolognese into a technological company in step with the times. Leading this miracle was Luigi Marmiroli, the project manager who, forty years after the start of the works, agreed to tell us the “behind the scenes”
Words and B&W Photography Alessandro Barteletti
Car Photography Paolo Carlini
Video Andrea Ruggeri
Archive Courtesy of the Luigi Marmiroli Archive
That year, the Marmiroli family had decided to spend their Easter holidays on Lake Trasimeno, one of the rare opportunities to enjoy some time all together. Aged just over forty, the mechanical engineer Luigi was always traveling around the world. He parked the motorhome near a large farm estate and asked his wife to wait there with their three children, while he continued on foot. It was 1985.
On that short trip from there to the gates of the estate, he couldn’t help smiling. After all, his was a story of fate. He was born in 1943 on a farm in Fiorano Modenese, on the very land that would later be home to the Ferrari testing circuit. And it was precisely at Ferrari, after university, that he began his career as a designer. His was dumb luck. It was 1970, and he was put in charge of overseeing the introduction of computers, a matter that was as futuristic as it was complex. The Ferrari veterans, from Franco Rocchi to Walter Salvarani to Mauro Forghieri, had to go through him to translate their drawings and ideas into a language that could be managed by the modern computer. And that was how Marmiroli learned the secrets of building cars from the best.
In 1976, with his friend and colleague Giacomo Caliri, he set up Fly Studio, and soon became a consultant for Fittipaldi’s Copersucar, ATS, Minardi and Carlo Chiti, the former Ferrari engineer and then star of Autodelta, so all the Alfa Romeo racing history from the 1960s onwards. For Chiti and Autodelta those were the Formula 1 years, and Marmiroli found himself increasingly involved in the project, and indeed in 1983 was appointed technical director of Euroracing, the team that inherited the Alfa Romeo single-seaters.
After two years on the world circuits, the call came. During the 1984 San Marino Grand Prix, Marmiroli was approached in the pits in Imola: “Come and work for us,” a Lamborghini delegate asked him. “We have to develop the heir to the Countach.” And that’s how the incredible story of the supercar that would one day be called the Diablo began.
