The Lamborghini Miura debuted with ballast in its engine bay and the lid locked
When the Lamborghini Miura prototype arrived at the 1966 Geneva show, nobody had checked whether its engine actually fitted. So the team filled the engine bay with ballast and kept the cover locked, turning away curious journalists. The car still stole the show and became the template for supercars.
The Miura was a side project. In 1965 three young engineers, Giampaolo Dallara, Paolo Stanzani and Bob Wallace, worked on it at night, against the instincts of Ferruccio Lamborghini, who preferred refined grand tourers to the race-bred machines of his rival Ferrari. When he finally saw their prototype, he let them carry on, reasoning it would at least be good publicity. Its bare rolling chassis at the 1965 Turin show drew orders from visitors even though it had no body.
The layout was radical. The V12 sat crosswise behind the cabin, driving the rear wheels, and to save space the engine, gearbox and differential were cast as one unit, an idea borrowed from the humble Morris Mini. It was the first high-performance production road car with that rear mid-engine arrangement, now standard for supercars, and at launch it was the fastest production car in the world. Marcello Gandini's styling for Bertone made his name. The car took the name of a famous breeder of Spanish fighting bulls and gained worldwide fame in the opening scenes of the original 1969 film The Italian Job.
Sharing oil between engine and gearbox had a drawback: metal shavings from the gears could drift into the engine. Only the last 96 cars of the final SV version got separate lubrication. The SV, presented in 1971, lost the eyelash trim around its headlamps and gained wider rear wheels, and its V12 made 385 metric horsepower.
Famous owners included Frank Sinatra, and Eddie Van Halen's Miura can be heard revving on the song Panama. Wallace built a single lightweight racing test car, the Jota, about 800 pounds lighter than standard, which burned out after a crash in 1971. A factory SVJ once owned by the Shah of Iran later sold to Nicolas Cage in 1997 for 490,000 dollars, then a record for the model.
Source: Lamborghini Miura
