There was a moment in the history of the world when a rock drummer, or an Italian air-conditioning millionaire, could leave home scrunching the gravel on his oval drive, put in some psychedelically mind-warping high-speed kilometres, and scrunch up another oval drive in Monaco, Mentone or St Moritz. For the purpose, the world’s best automotive engineers created the perfect instrument for the connoisseur driver, a mid-engined car that obediently rewarded every input and intention. Unleashing four litres of bellowing Italian performance engineering, inches behind your neck, and guzzling fuel through a dozen massive Bologna-built Weber carburettor barrels, seemed an almost blameless act in an age before issues of global warming came to light. The oval drives were important because the rear view in the Lamborghini Miura was awful and reversing a nightmare.
As part of the bid to outdo Ferrari in a true super-sports car, Lamborghini set out to use race technology and solutions to create the preeminent road-going GT car. The body followed the pattern of the Ford/Lola GT40, being an integrated structural monocoque. The mid-engine solution came from contemporary sports car racing, to give perfect balance, and the race-bred independent suspension was as smart and faithful as you could get.
All this would have counted for little if the car had been ugly but, remarkably, it had the attention of the two best design talents in the business. Giorgetto Giugiaro (1938–) had recently left Bertone, the design consultancy that was developing the body shape for the new Lamborghini, leaving a new mid-engined project on the stocks, but his successor, Marcello Gandini, finished it and turned it into the Miura. Particularly striking is the way the swelling of the rear wing (fender) echoes that of the front, like waves in the sea, and just as the Cisitalia set the form for sports cars for decades, so did the Miura for the new mid-engined layout – echoes of it were evident in the Ferrari Dino and even the more recent Lotus Elise.
The Miura set a new classical standard for the mid-engined performance car in the way Cisitalia had done earlier for front-engined sports cars.