LAMBORGHINI MIURA

presented him with blank cheques on the stand before the bodywork for the transverse-engined car had even been designed. Then, one evening, Nuccio Bertone paid a visit, offering to clothe the new car. Ferruccio’s response was, ‘You at last! Everybody has been here today because they want to body this chassis.’

Bertone tasked his new chief designer, the 27-year-old Marcello Gandini, to create the Miura’s shape, with the car unveiled at Geneva in 1966. Once merely slighted, Ferrari was now on the back foot to a firm that had only been building cars for five years. This was the era of Can-am and Interserie, and Enzo’s flagship road cars were now looking old-fashioned. Ferruccio expected to sell fewer than 500 Miuras, but in the end he sold 850.

It wasn’t just in the field of car design where Lamborghini left Ferrari standing. Unlike Enzo, Ferruccio understood the power of PR and lent cars for the press to test. He also product-placed a Miura in the opening scenes of The Italian Job. Without ever having to turn a wheel on a racetrack, and at very little expense to the firm itself, no-one was left in any doubt as to what Lamborghini stood for. It wasn’t until 1973, under new Fiat ownership, that Ferrari finally countered with the 365GT4 Berlinetta Boxer, by which point Lamborghini and Gandini had made even that look positively conventional with the Countach. Ever since, while Ferrari may have held supremacy on the racetrack, Lamborghinis have pushed design boundaries. And it all started here.