CarBrandLogos archive · Lamborghini · 1966

LamborghiniMiura

Racing-car architecture in a road car, drawn by a 27-year-old and built almost in secret.

Photo: Chelsea Jay · CC BY-SA 4.0

The story

A defining chapter in Lamborghini history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Lamborghini Miura, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Ferruccio Lamborghini had been explicit: his company would build refined grand tourers and would not go racing. Three of his young engineers, Gian Paolo Dallara, Paolo Stanzani and test driver Bob Wallace, spent their own time in 1965 developing something else entirely. They wanted a road car built the way a Ford GT40 or a Ferrari P was built, with the engine behind the driver, and they worked on the chassis outside their normal duties until it was far enough along to show him. Ferruccio, who understood publicity, let them continue. What they brought to the Turin show in November 1965 was a bare rolling chassis with no body on it at all: a folded and riveted steel platform carrying a 3.9-litre V12 mounted transversely behind the cockpit. Nobody had done that in a production car, and orders were taken on the strength of the chassis alone.

Lamborghini Miura Concept · smartvital from Berlin, Germany · CC BY-SA 2.0

Design and engineering

The transverse layout solved a packaging problem and created a mechanical one. Engine, five-speed gearbox and final drive were combined in a single casting sharing one oil supply, which kept the drivetrain short enough to sit between the axles but made the unit awkward to service and allowed debris to travel between gearbox and engine; later cars separated the lubrication systems. The body came from Bertone, where Marcello Gandini, then in his twenties and newly appointed head of styling, produced the shape shown complete at Geneva in March 1966. The eyelashes around the headlamps, the louvred rear window and the clamshell front and rear sections that lift to expose the whole car were his, and the extraordinarily low nose was possible only because nothing sat under it. Lamborghini named the car after a breeder of fighting bulls, establishing a convention the company still follows.

1965 Turin Salon Miura Chassis -1 · Original uploader was Miuragirl at en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

In production

The reception was immediate. The Miura was the fastest road car in the world when it appeared, and customers who had been ordering from Maranello found themselves waiting on a firm three years old. Its opening sequence in The Italian Job, a P400 winding up the Great St Bernard Pass to a Quincy Jones score, gave it a life well beyond the specialist press. Development ran through the P400 S of 1968, which stiffened the chassis and improved the cabin, to the SV of 1971, which widened the rear track, revised the rear suspension and dropped the headlamp eyelashes. Testers noted consistently that the nose grew light at speed, a consequence of a body shaped by eye rather than in a wind tunnel, and the cabin was hot and loud in the way mid-engined cars of the period generally were.

12-01-03-autostadtl-by-Ralf R-32 · Ralf Roletschek (talk) - Wissensmanagement mit Wikis · FAL

Legacy

Production ended in 1973 after fewer than 800 cars of all types, a small number for a design that redirected a whole class. Every mid-engined supercar since works to the template it set, and the Countach that replaced it turned the engine through ninety degrees to cure the servicing problem while keeping everything the Miura had proved. It also settled what Lamborghini was for. Ferruccio wanted to build comfortable grand tourers; his engineers built the car his company has been measured against ever since.

At a glance