Italdesign Calá

If you were an 11-year-old car enthusiast in Canada, in 1995, there was precious little to watch.

Sure, you could watch something like the original series of Top Gear — if you were lucky enough to get it. You could watch American car review shows like Motorweek, as I did. If you didn't get those, many local TV stations would visit an auto show and produce an idiotic report full of factual errors.

If you wanted to see a supercar moving, you were pretty much out of luck. No Chris Harris, no Top Gear, no Hagerty-whatever, no…YouTube.

There was one option, however. Video games. They'd just figured out how to put (relatively) high-quality video on a CD, bundled with the data for a game.

When I fired up Need For Speed: II and watched the Italdesign Calá leap from the pages of Road & Track onto a deserted country road next to a Jaguar XJ220, I was astonished.

Is this real life??

Some vehicles make a lot of sense, even today. In 1995, your choice of branded, mid-range supercar was between the Ferrari F355 and the Porsche 911 Turbo. Lamborghini was nowhere to me — the Jalpa was killed in 1988…the Diablo was it — and the Gallardo wouldn't appear for another seven years. 

The Italdesign Calá, with its fully-functioning, mid-mounted 372+ horsepower V10 engine, rear-drive, targa top, and 2+2 interior layout seemed to be the perfect competitor to its contemporaries. But it wasn't that simple. 

First shown at the Geneva Motor Show in 1995, Calá was a fully functioning prototype commissioned by then-Lamborghini owners Megatech.

The bullish Italian brand had just come out of a messy deal with Chrysler, after being traded around among wealthy owners since Ferruccio Lamborghini's death.

Its styling (to impressionable younger me) was exceptional. Headlight vents that echoed the Miura, a raked windshield like the Countach, and styling cues that were soft like a Porsche but more extreme than the Ferrari models of that era.