Lamborghini Miura: the world’s first supercar

A car like this had never been seen before. When the Lamborghini Miura P400 was unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1966, the feeling was that of encountering an object that had landed from another dimension. It startled and fascinated at the same time. The profile was extremely low and taut, like a blade; the volume seemed pressed toward the asphalt, with the roof of the cabin just 110 centimetres above the ground.

The front bonnet was long and sharply pointed. The headlights emerged beneath metal eyelids framed by the famous “eyelashes,” a graphic detail that made the car instantly recognizable. At the rear, the large engine cover—integrating fenders and luggage compartment—opened like a continuous shell, perforated by slats that were both technical function and aesthetic statement.

The Miura was the result of a rare synthesis of engineering and design culture. Designed by Marcello Gandini for Carrozzeria Bertone, it translated onto the road an imagination that had until then belonged only to racing. Gandini worked through subtraction and tension: nearly flat surfaces that curve only slightly, sharp edges, and a steeply raked windshield that anticipated the visual language of the supercars to come. There was no superfluous ornament; every element was a function that became a sign.

“This one I like. With this we enter the legend,” Ferruccio Lamborghini reportedly said while observing the first drawings. The remark captures a crucial point: the Miura was not simply a new car but a change of paradigm. Until then, high-performance grand tourers retained a classical layout, with a front engine and established proportions. The Miura overturned everything. It brought to the road an architecture borrowed from racing: a V12 mounted transversely in the rear, combined with the gearbox in a single casting to reduce size and weight.

The name P400 already sounded like a manifesto: “P” for posteriore (rear), “400” for its 4-litre displacement (3,929 cc). In the first version the twelve-cylinder engine produced 350 hp at 7,000 rpm; this would rise to 370 hp at 7,700 rpm in the Miura S and 385 hp at 7,850 rpm in the SV. In the context of the mid-1960s, these numbers redefined the very idea of road-going performance. Because of its extraordinary nature, journalists coined a new word: “supercar.” It was not a marketing label but the recognition that a new category was needed to describe such an object.

Success was immediate. Orders surprised both Ferruccio Lamborghini and Nuccio Bertone. Between 1966 and 1968, 265 P400 models were produced. From 1969 to 1971 came 338 P400 S versions, with improved interiors and more power. Between 1971 and 1973, 150 Miura SVs were built—the most radical evolution, with wider rear tyres, enlarged fenders, a stiffer chassis and revised suspension. In the SV, the gearbox lubrication system became independent from the engine’s, improving reliability and mechanical performance. The headlights also lost their “eyelashes,” a sign of maturity—almost a transition from rebellious adolescence to technical confidence. Among the special versions were four SVJ models derived from the Jota prototype and the single Miura Spyder, also built by Bertone.

Ferruccio Lamborghini 

Inside, the cockpit translated the same formal tension. In front of the driver rose the two large “binocular” instruments of tachometer and speedometer; in the first series the secondary switches were placed on the roof lining, a theatrical solution that reinforced the sensation of sitting in a cockpit rather than a travelling lounge. The Miura did not simulate racing—it staged it.

Yet above all it was the proportions that made the car timeless. The distance between the front axle and the cabin, the compact tail, the balance between glass surfaces and metal panels defined an archetype replicated for decades. Every mid-engine supercar that followed—regardless of brand—would have to measure itself against that layout. The Miura did not simply introduce a technical solution; it introduced a mental image of speed.

Its influence extended beyond the automotive world. It became a cultural icon, an object of desire for actors and rock stars, and a memorable cinematic presence. The opening sequence of The Italian Job—with Rossano Brazzi driving an orange Miura over the Great St Bernard Pass, accompanied by the song In Days Like These sung by Matt Monro—remains one of the most famous moments in automotive cinema: a few minutes that forever fixed the idea of a car as a total aesthetic experience.

Sixty years after its debut, the Miura remains a radical project. It is not only the first true supercar; it is the object that established the very idea of the supercar as the absolute convergence of form and engineering. A car in which design does not merely dress the mechanics but generates them—and in which the mechanics, in turn, become a formal argument. In that synthesis lies its modernity: not a stylistic exercise, but a three-dimensional manifesto of what the automobile could—and still can—be.