Miura

Lamborghini Miura: The Tractor Man's Answer to Ferrari

Ferruccio Lamborghini did not start out trying to humiliate Enzo Ferrari. He started out building tractors. After wartime service and salvage work with surplus military engines, Lamborghini built a successful business, Lamborghini Trattori, founded in 1948, manufacturing farm tractors and later boilers and air conditioners in and around Emilia-Romagna. He was wealthy enough by the early 1960s to own several Ferraris, and it is from that ownership, not from any racing ambition, that the story of Automobili Lamborghini is popularly said to begin. According to the account repeated across most Lamborghini histories, Ferruccio was unhappy with the clutch in one of his Ferraris and took his complaint directly to Enzo Ferrari, who is said to have told him, in effect, to go back to making tractors and leave sports cars to the professionals. The exact words are known only from later retellings. But the outcome is not in dispute: in 1963 Ferruccio Lamborghini founded Automobili Lamborghini in Sant'Agata Bolognese with the explicit intent of building a refined, exceptionally engineered road car that could outclass Ferrari on its own terms.

He assembled a serious technical team for a newcomer: Giotto Bizzarrini, fresh off Ferrari's V12 program, designed the first Lamborghini engine; Gian Paolo Dallara and Paolo Stanzani developed the chassis engineering; Franco Scaglione contributed early bodywork. The company's first cars, the 350 GT and 400 GT, were competent, well-mannered grand tourers. They were good enough to establish Lamborghini as a credible builder, but no rival to Ferrari's mystique. That changed with a decision that had nothing to do with styling and everything to do with layout. Dallara and Stanzani proposed mounting the V12 transversely, amidships, behind the driver. The configuration was borrowed conceptually from contemporary racing prototypes but never before attempted in a series road car. Lamborghini's engineers built a bare, engine-in-place rolling chassis and showed it undressed at the Turin Motor Show in November 1965, a startling admission that the mechanical layout itself was the story before any body existed to clothe it.

The body came from Carrozzeria Bertone, and specifically from Marcello Gandini, who had just joined Bertone in 1965 after Giorgetto Giugiaro's departure and, by most accounts, sketched the Miura's shape to finished prototype in a matter of months. What Bertone's stand revealed at the Geneva Motor Show on 10 March 1966 was unlike anything else on the floor: a low, taut, curvaceous shape with 'eyelash' trim around pop-up headlamps, sitting over a mid-mounted V12 in a way no production road car had done before. The finished prototype, painted orange, was reportedly driven to the show personally by Nuccio Bertone, and it is widely credited, including in Lamborghini's own retrospective materials, with overshadowing Ferrari's competing debutant that year, the 330 GTC. A period press claim of a 198 mph top speed, almost certainly optimistic by later measured standards, accompanied the unveiling and helped cement the car's outlaw reputation before a single production example had reached a customer.

The production Miura, badged P400 for its 4.0-litre V12, reached customers from 1967. Lamborghini revised the car twice more over the course of its run: the P400 S (Miura S), shown at Turin in November 1968, added power and refined trim and interior appointments, while the definitive P400 SV (Miura SV), introduced in 1971, widened the rear track, separated the engine and transmission oil supplies to cure a chronic shared-sump weakness, and dropped the signature eyelash trim around the headlights for a cleaner face. Production ended in 1973 as Lamborghini shifted its flagship ambitions to the car that would replace it. Sources give different counts for each type. Lamborghini's own heritage pages give a total of 763 cars, and a figure of 764 circulates almost universally across enthusiast material. Variant splits run to roughly 265–275 P400s, between 140 and 338 P400 S cars depending on the source, and a more consistently cited 150 SV cars. Lamborghini's own split of 265, 338 and 150 adds to 753, and the company attributes the ten-car difference from its 763 total to a small number of cars built for markets such as the United States and the Middle East that are sometimes counted separately. The Miura Register lists 762 production numbers issued, and the specialist site lambomiura.com counts 741 unique cars once factory rebuilds that were given new chassis numbers are removed.

What is much better documented is the car's engineering ambition and its limits. Lamborghini's own development driver, the New Zealander Bob Wallace, working with chief engineer Paolo Stanzani, built a stripped, lightened, track-focused Miura in 1970 that they called the Jota, after the FIA's Appendix J competition regulations it was theoretically built to satisfy. Reports place its output near 440 bhp and its weight nearly 250 kg below a standard SV, with 0-60 mph performance well ahead of the road car. Ferruccio Lamborghini, however, maintained a firm policy against factory racing, believing it a distraction and a financial risk unsuited to a company that needed to sell road cars to survive; the sole Jota was eventually sold to a private customer in 1972 and was destroyed in a road accident shortly afterward, closing off what has since become one of the great unrealized 'what ifs' of the marque's history. A small number of later cars, called SV/J, were built to a road-legal specification inspired by the Jota rather than to genuine competition spec: reportedly around four factory-built examples between late 1971 and 1973, one of them supplied to the Shah of Iran, with a further handful of later conversions to similar specification.

The Miura's market and cultural reception cannot be separated from what it did to the emerging idea of a 'supercar.' Contemporary and later commentators have repeatedly credited it as the car that invented the category: a two-seat, mid-engined, twelve-cylinder road car built explicitly to be the fastest and most dramatic thing on the road, sold not to racing teams but to private wealthy customers as a usable, if temperamental, daily exotic. It established, within Lamborghini's own three-model-old history, the layout, the ambition, and the design partnership with Bertone and Gandini that would directly shape its successor. It also set a pattern the marque would repeat for decades: cars whose engineering daring and design impact are extremely well documented, and whose production counts differ from one source to the next, however confidently the same handful of numbers get repeated online.

Today, Lamborghini's own in-house heritage division, Polo Storico, founded in 2015 and responsible for authenticating and restoring every Lamborghini from the 1963 350 GT through the final 2001 Diablo, holds the factory's original build records (chassis numbers, engine and gearbox codes, body and trim specification) and offers a formal Certification of Authenticity service overseen by a body Lamborghini calls the Comitato dei Saggi. That archive is almost certainly the only realistic source for a definitive, chassis-by-chassis Miura production count, but no published, dated Polo Storico document stating an aggregate total has surfaced, so the '764' figure remains a widely repeated default rather than a confirmed count.

Even the auction houses that catalog Miuras with the most apparent rigor do not agree with each other, or with Lamborghini's own retrospective materials, about how many were built. RM Sotheby's has offered a Miura P400 (chassis 01024) described as 'the third production Miura P400 and the eighth example constructed overall' against a stated total of roughly 753 cars across all variants. That is a third figure alongside 763 and 764, and it is the exact sum of Lamborghini's own three variant counts. Bonhams' own cataloguing is, by contrast, the most consistent on the SV specifically: its lot notes for chassis 4976 state flatly that 'only 150 SVs had been made when production ceased at the end of 1972,' the same number given independently by Lamborghini's own heritage-page summary and by at least one specialist retailer, with no dissenting figure in published accounts. Such unanimity is unusual in Miura production history: of every Miura production number in circulation, the 150-car SV figure is the one with the least disagreement behind it.

Screen Idol, Auction Icon

In December 1969, a bright orange Miura opened Peter Collinson's heist comedy The Italian Job with one of the most celebrated sequences in car-chase cinema: several unbroken minutes of the car threading hairpin bends on the Great St Bernard Pass in the Alps to Matt Monro's theme song 'On Days Like These,' before the film's opening joke reveals the car crushed by a bulldozer and shoved into a gorge. Lamborghini supplied two cars for the shoot; one, already damaged, became the stunt car pushed off the mountainside, while the surviving orange example, chassis #3586, disappeared from public record for decades until Lamborghini's own Polo Storico authentication division tracked it down and formally certified it in 2019 as the genuine film car, with longtime factory employee and Italian Job stunt double Enzo Moruzzi driving it back onto the grounds at Sant'Agata Bolognese. The sequence did more than sell tickets: it fixed in a mass audience's mind, years before most of them would ever see a Miura in the metal, an association between this specific car and effortless, slightly reckless glamour that the marque's own marketing could never have manufactured on its own.

That glamour had a real customer base, and the clearest documented instance among the Miura's celebrity owners is Frank Sinatra, who made an unannounced visit to the Sant'Agata factory in 1969 and ordered a Miura P400 S finished in Arancio Metallico over an interior trimmed in wild boar hide with orange shag carpet, dispatched on 12 December 1969, his 54th birthday. Sinatra's car eventually passed through the collector market and sold for $150,000 at a Christie's auction in New York in June 2003, a figure that reads as almost quaint against later Miura prices: a Miura SV previously owned by musician Jay Kay of Jamiroquai brought a reported $4.9 million at RM Sotheby's 'Dare to Dream' sale in the spring of 2024, and in March 2026 a 1972 Miura P400 SV sold for $6,605,000 at the Amelia Concours auctions, a new record for any Miura at public sale and more than $1.7 million clear of the previous mark. The spread between a $150,000 sale in 2003 and a $6.6 million sale a little over two decades later says less about inflation than about how completely the collector-car market's estimate of the Miura's importance has changed.

The Marque's Absence From Racing

Set against that market enthusiasm is a quieter, deliberate choice Ferruccio Lamborghini made and never reversed: Lamborghini would not go racing. Enzo Ferrari had built his company the other way around, treating road cars largely as the financing mechanism for a racing program that was the actual point of the enterprise; Ferruccio inverted that logic, building a company whose road cars were the point and whose founder had, by most accounts of his outlook, little appetite for spending drivers' lives on a business he saw as too dangerous and too financially risky to be worth it. That view of him comes from later accounts rather than a quoted statement of his own. The clearest evidence of how firm that line was is what happened to the one car built expressly to test it: Bob Wallace and Paolo Stanzani's 1970 Jota, lightened and reworked to a specification the FIA's Appendix J regulations might have accepted, was never fielded by the factory in competition, was sold to a private customer in 1972, and was destroyed in a road accident not long after. That left Lamborghini's most focused Miura variant with no competition history at all, by policy rather than accident. It is a stance the marque would not meaningfully abandon until decades later, when Huracán GT3 cars and a company-run Super Trofeo series finally gave Lamborghini the kind of factory-adjacent racing presence Ferrari had built its entire identity around from day one.

The Miura Register and a page from lambomiura.com offer an explanation, if not a resolution, for the Miura's stubborn production-count spread. The Miura Register lists 762 cars by production number, inside the cluster of figures between 753 and 764. lambomiura.com goes a step further, citing marque historians Coltrin and Sackey: both list 762 production numbers issued, but note that 21 of those numbers were reassigned to rebuilt cars rather than newly built ones, leaving 741 physically unique cars actually constructed. Read together, the two sources suggest the long-running disagreement may not be one number in dispute at all, but two different things being counted: production numbers issued (a tight cluster around 762-764) versus unique cars built once rebuild-driven renumbering is removed (741). This accounts for the discrepancy better than any single figure on its own, though it stops short of settling which framing the factory itself would recognize.