1986 Lamborghini Jalpa Is a Little Lambo That’s Big on Fun

From the June 1986 issue of Car and Driver.

Mary has a little Lambo
That makes police go white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary goes
The cops are sure to show.

If Mary got her little Lambo for gradua­tion, she’s probably in over her head. The Jalpa (pronounced “Yahl-pa”) is the sort of grim fairy tale that is aimed at the young­-at-heart, not the graduation-present set. This hairy device makes about as much sense for kids as rotgut and razor blades. It may be small, but it’s plenty potent. Only grown-ups need apply.

Of all the adult toys Lamborghini has crafted over the years, it is famous for only one: the almighty twelve-cylinder Countach, which looms larger than life and lower than paint on pavement. The Countach has been around for fifteen years now, but strapping into one is still like straddling a Sidewinder. It is the first step on the ride of your life.

Not everybody is cut out to go belly to belly with the big bopper. Some are cut out for a medium bopper. The Jalpa may be smaller and shy on banzai bodywork, but it pumps down deep with much the same de­termination as its big brother.

If the Jalpa looks familiar, that’s because it first appeared as the Urraco in 1970, a year before the Countach was unveiled. Sketched in by Bertone as an airy, pointy, graceful coupe, the Urraco P250 burbled out with a spirited 2.5-liter V-8. In 1974, as a hedge against an Italian tax on engines over 2.0 liters, one version of the mid­-mounted motor shrank to 1973 cc—but the power-minded at Lamborghini also produced a 3.0-liter bomb for the faithful, lest they be left too far behind by the Countach. In 1976, an upgraded version of the Urraco, with a targa top, big B­-pillars, a front spoiler, and squared-off fender flares, took the name Silhouette, while the Urraco designation and styling continued in the original. But after only a handful of the targas had been built, the factory found itself in a financial bind. By 1979, both the Urraco and the Silhouette were gone, and only the Countach was left wearing the Lamborghini label.

In 1981, the little Lambo reappeared in Europe as the Jalpa. It wore a sharper air dam, cleft in the middle. The visibility to the rear quarters, which had never been better than so-so, was masked off almost entirely by zoomy new roof buttresses along the engine bay. From the outside, the rear-three-quarter angle served to con­vince gawkers that the Jalpa was not a Ferrari with a hormonal imbalance. When gaping at the Lambo’s nose, the gawkers are still not sure—it’s special, yes, and they see that the body is low and wide, and be­neath the cacophony of high-pitched engine noises emanating from the overhead cams they may even pick out the character­istic V-8 rumble—but the arty, clapboard­ish look of those buttresses testifies that this is not just another Ferrari tippy-toe tearabout. Damned if gawkers can tell what breed of Lamborghini this might be, though, when they move in to eyeball its badge. The Jalpa script is illegible even up close, so it’s all guesswork unless they manage to make their question heard over the constant commotion of the howling engine. The serious gawkers manage, be­cause they want to know badly enough to make themselves heard.

To hold their attention, tell them that only 50 to 70 factory-certified Jalpas will reach the States this year. Countaches, with about a hundred on the way, seem common in comparison. (Feel free to leave out the part about the big boppers being flown over, while the little Lambos come by slow boat from Bologna.) Our test car came from Lamborghini East, located in North Bergen, New Jersey, which handles U.S. distribution east of the Mississippi and, because of a marketing quirk, in Houston, Texas.

In order to clear the Jalpa with the feds, Lamborghini installs all necessary safety and emissions hardware at the factory, and the importer tests each car for exhaust cleanliness upon arrival in the U.S. Lamborghini East is a very small opera­tion, a hands-on kind of deal. Boss Joe Nastasi spearheaded the legalization of the Countach engine, and he personally crawls over and through each Jalpa to give it the mechanical equivalent of a shave, a haircut, and a pat on the back before send­ing it out the door. Sure enough, through efforts that apparently extend all the way to the top at the factory, our Jalpa rolled out to meet us with every thread in place and almost every ruffle tucked away.

Except for a smattering of detail faults, the Jalpa’s interior and exterior prove suit­ably if not wildly trick, and the interior is especially handsome. Our test car was out­fitted with tan leather seats trimmed with red piping. The same deft combination, which followed the straight-and-true na­ture of the padding and sewing, carried through to the dramatic door panels and armrests. The seats are more supportive than those in, say, the Ferrari 308, though less so than those in the new 328. The Jalpa’s deep torso bolsters do what they can for cornering, and the pronounced butt pockets keep you in place during braking, but the seats lack good under-­thigh support. What seat padding there is feels very firm, in keeping with the Jalpa’s no-nonsense approach. It has to be firm, because driving the Jalpa requires extra effort. The steering is heavy, the clutch is a bear, the shifter should be an exercise device for arm-wrestlers, and even the long-­throw gas pedal requires major muscle.

No nonsense is the dominant theme throughout the Jalpa’s interior. The driv­ing position props you up suitably for get­ting to grips with the handy, sporty, and exceptionally handsome three-spoke wheel. Its tilt is reasonable for ease of winding and unwinding, requiring little displacement of your shoulders as your hands cross over the top of the steering arc. Plenty of legroom for six-footers stretches down into the inward-canted footwells, and the right-side recess con­tains a handy tubular foot rest. Seen through the wheel, the tachometer and the speedometer live in saucer-sized recesses that bracket a smaller oil-pressure gauge. High on the dash above the console, an an­gled binnacle houses water- and oil-tem­perature dials, a fuel gauge, and a row of switches. Most of the climate controls hun­ker lower on the console. Heating proved fine in cold weather, though Old Man Win­ter gave our Jalpa no chance to strut what­ever stuff its air conditioning can bring to bear. For some reason, Italian exoticar manufacturers favor odd mixtures of con­trol shapes; Lamborghini pairs rectangu­lar heater and defroster controls with round vents, a contrast made more appar­ent by their stark black finish amid the warm glow of tan leather.

When the Jalpa wears its targa roof pan­el, you’ll find a surprising amount of lug­gage space behind the seats, but pop the top and it usurps the spot. No problem: there is plenty of room for several soft cases in a cozily carpeted trunk behind the engine, though this cell is engine-heated and therefore not recommended for trans­porting hamsters, unless they’re the per­manent-press models.

Like the Countach we tested two months ago, the Jalpa has a vastly better finish than Lambos of old. The paint is so smooth it could make you forget that or­ange peel ever existed. Not that you can see much of the outside surface from the inside—except to the rear, as mentioned. The back window is about the size of a Band-Aid, and the third brake light hangs down at the top to hamper vision further. The inside rear-view mirror shivers at about a three on the Richter scale. Luckily, though the door-mounted mirrors also have a bad case of the quivers, they work much better than the cosmetic peepers that adorn most exotics: they swivel through a wide range at the touch of a but­ton, and they’re good-sized.

The Jalpa’s blind spots, however, make another good case for accelerating into holes when changing lanes. In our experi­ence, any Italian V-8 provides a suitable cure for poor visibility, and the Jalpa’s is no exception. The deep-throat throttle action may momentarily mislead you into think­ing that not much is happening, but press the point with extra zeal and you suddenly find your kit and caboodle hammering along well beyond the point of launch and ready to program for reentry into the ap­proved traffic pattern. Track testing quickly puts the lie to the long-travel throttle ac­tion: 0 to 60 romps up in 5.8 seconds, the quarter-mile in 14.5 seconds at 93 mph. Top speed is estimated at 148 mph—no match for the Countach, the Ferrari Testa­rossa, or even the new 328, but not alto­gether shabby. Braking from 70 to 0 re­quires 192 feet. Modulation on the track or road is excellent, and the brakes squeeze the Jalpa smoothly down into corners, the taut chassis exhibiting minimal dive.

The independent strut-type suspension soaks up lumpy stuff without throwing the Jalpa off its stride. The steering, however, needs attentive hands: though it admirably seeks straight-ahead on smooth roads, it quickly forgets its sense of direction over bumps and dips. As is typical of Lamborghinis, the Jalpa’s handling is much closer to neutral than most Ferraris’, feeling crisp and rewarding at the first brush of the wheel. Brush it wrong, though, or confound the balance with a big change in power, and most of the poise goes out the window, leaving you to do battle with unpleasant oscillations be­tween understeer and oversteer. In other words, this little Lambo rewards solid, well-judged driving technique. Feed it only to the point where it nibbles, which is not far short of where it bites.

Inside, all is uproarious, with bellows and buzzes and thrums and overloads and blank spots and glitches and smoothness thrown together to tug at your sense of dy­namic right and wrong. The Jalpa hollers for your attention, then does its best to dis­tract you. Just when you begin to feel you’ve got the flow in order, the car tweaks you to prove that mastery is hard to come by. Because the Jalpa exacts penalties for its peculiarities, it can be more difficult to drive than a lesser machine. But when you drive through the difficulties to tap its nat­ural rhythm, it makes you appreciate the potential of fairy tales all over again.

Testing Tribulations

The sad tale of the bad-luck Jalpa.

When a car like the Lamborghini Jalpa shows up, the Car and Driver office buzz­es with excitement. The opportunity to drive such an exotic makes up for a lot of late nights under deadline. Unfortu­nately, our Jalpa experience quickly turned from a beautiful dream into a re­curring nightmare.

Our first attempt to test the Jalpa, at the Chrysler proving grounds, ended when the printer in our fifth-wheel com­puter refused to produce anything but gibberish. Efforts to coax it into opera­tion, while Lamborghini representative Stanley Gruen looked on patiently, were unsuccessful. We would have to return to the test track at a later date, after get­ting the test equipment repaired.

We’ve learned to take such minor set­backs in stride, but we were unprepared for what happened next. On I-94, driv­ing the Jalpa from Chrysler back to the office, we were startled to see in our headlights a rapidly approaching wheel­-and-tire assembly. It had somehow come loose from a semi-trailer and was now bounding across the median and heading straight toward the Lambo’s windshield. With only a split second to react, we were unable to dodge the wheel and tire completely, and the Jalpa’s left front corner was destroyed. Luckily, we were unharmed, except for a few deep psychological scars.

Gruen took this catastrophe calmly and made arrangements to have the broken bull trucked back to Lambor­ghini East’s New Jersey headquarters. A trucker arrived the next day to retrieve the car, but his winch was hooked to a dead battery and was on the verge of falling apart. Fortunately, he also had a hand winch. Unfortunately, he was short of both chain for it and money to make good this deficiency. Two hours, one loan, and a trip to the hardware store lat­er, he and the Jalpa were on their way.

The next week, with the test equip­ment repaired and another Jalpa await­ing us in New Jersey, we flew east to fin­ish our testing and photography. Naturally, it rained for two days, which precluded testing and made photogra­phy next to impossible. We did get a few color photos during a momentary lull in the downpour and promptly shipped them back to the office. They were lost in transit. Other minor tragedies includ­ed a broken front spoiler as the Lamborghini people were unloading their car from a flatbed truck, and a bro­ken tooth as the technical editor was eat­ing dinner.

A week later, we decided to try again. The weather forecast called for sunny skies, so we made reservations for an­other trip to New Jersey. This time, the trouble started before we even got off the ground. Our flight to Newark was canceled because of mechanical problems, and the most timely alternative flight was booked solid. Our choices were to wait three hours for another plane or fly to Philadelphia and have a longer drive to the track.

We chose the latter option and ar­rived at Englishtown Raceway about an hour and a half late. The weather was perfect, but the Lamborghini was no­where to be found. The thought that the driver had got tired of waiting and left for home was too painful to contem­plate. Fortunately, he and the Jalpa soon showed up and we quickly mounted our fifth wheel.

Our only remaining worry was that the printer would fail us again, but this time it worked perfectly. Fortune, it seemed, was finally on our side. Then we discovered that the cable from the fifth wheel to the computer had devel­oped a break during shipping. Was there no mercy? Somehow, we managed to keep our sanity, jerry-rig a repair, and get the wheel working again.

We completed our mission without further incident and got the test results that appear at the end of this story. The plane didn’t even crash on the way home. —Csaba Csere

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com