The year was 1967, the car was the
Miura. Fusing V12 power with unsurpassable beauty, it changed Lamborghini and
the car world forever. It would be rude not to drive it
The Miura refashioned the performance car
landscape, like Keith Kirsten with a chainsaw. But it also changed Lamborghini,
forever. Before the Miura, Sant A’gata’s most famous exporter was a maker of
fast, but conventional, and, it has to be said, not particularly handsome,
front-engine GT cars. Ferruccio Lamborghini wanted to create a useable,
powerful sports dourer, but one built from the ground up as a road car, not one
taken from the track and detuned to suit. The bug-eyed 350GT was the result,
and had Lamborghini continued along that path and survived this long, it might
now be Italy’s answer to Aston Martin. Instead, thanks to the Miura and the
transformation it wrought on the company that built it, no car maker – not even
Ferrari is more closely associated with the supercar.
The
Miura refashioned the performance car landscape, like Keith Kirsten with a
chainsaw. But it also changed Lamborghini, forever.
Car worship is a broad church; this is a
magazine predominantly concerned with the new, and old cars might not be your
thing, no matter their provenance. But look at this machine – it’s got ‘dream
garage top 10’ written all over it. While the outrageous styling of its
Countach successor, an exercise in shock, not beauty, looks ever more a product
of its era as the years pass, the Miura never seems to date. This is not merely
a great-looking old car; it somehow looks utterly contemporary, though
ironically, its lines are echoed more clearly in Ferrari’s 458 than in
Lamborghini’s own Gallardo.
It’s impossible to talk about this iconic
Lamborghini without conjuring up images of its beautifully tailored aluminum
panels, yet that’s exactly how the world first met the Miura. At the 1965 Turin
show, Lamborghini revealed a bare monologue chassis constructed from sheet steel,
the work of young engineers Gian Paolo Dallara and Paolo Stanzini. Nestling
behind the two-seat cabin lay the front-engine 400GT’s V12, but turned through
90 degrees, and bolted on top of the five-speed gearbox.
Even in this unfinished state the car generated
such a fuss that Lamborghini was inundated with deposits from would-be
customers, and offers to clothe the chassis from Italy’s top design houses. It
would be another year before Lamborghini revealed the jaw-dropping alloy
top-coat, and two before production would begin. Those two years might have
been an agonizing wait for the deposit holders, but not long enough for
Lamborghini to get the original Miura P400 right. Over the next few years the
factory honed the car, ironing out glitches, stiffening the weak chassis to
create the Miura S, and reaching its zenith in the Miura SV, recognizable by
its wide arches and lack of headlamp eyelashes.
It
would be another year before Lamborghini revealed the jaw-dropping alloy
top-coat, and two before production would begin.
That’s what we’re driving today. Normally
found resting peacefully in Lamborghini’s on-site museum, this yellow SV has
been woken from its slumber for a blast on the roads around Sant A’gata. In
terms of ticks on the bucket list, this is bigger than the one hanging outside
Nike’s Oregon headquarters. When we drive new metal today it’s with the
knowledge that, in most cases, while we may not be able to afford it now, we
will in a just a few short years. This is different. A decade ago you could
have bought a Miura for the price of a brand new, well-specked 911 Carrera. But
while that 911 is now a R350k bargain, today a car like this rare SV would set
you back close on R10m. Even still, you could justify that price on rarity,
historical interest and sheer beauty. But you’d want it to drive well too,
right? Let’s find out if it does.
You
half expect it to swing down into a sensible position like a Lexus once you’ve
slotted the ignition key home, but it never happens.
The Miura is tiny; lithe and low, the peak
of its delicate roofline measuring an incredible 86mm closer to the ground than
even an Aventador’s. The frameless doors open to ape the look of a bull’s horns
when viewed dead-on, this being the first in a long line of Lamborghinis to be named
after a grumpy cow. The torero theme continues inside: drop into the low-slung
black bucket seat and the skyward angle of the steering suggests being gored in
the crotch might be more comfortable than an hour in here. You half expect it
to swing down into a sensible position like a Lexus once you’ve slotted the
ignition key home, but it never happens. Headroom is tight and I’ve got the
seat jammed tight up against the rear bulkhead, my legs splayed out like an
expectant mother. But the view out past those spaghetti-thin pillars is
incredible, as epically widescreen as the Panavision-filmed opening sequence to
The Italian Job.
