Miura (Miura)

A Chassis With No Body Ferruccio Lamborghini had not asked for the Miura. It was conceived in 1965 by three young employees - the engineer Gian Paolo Dallara, his colleague Paolo Stanzani and the test driver Bob Wallace - who worked up a mid-engined chassis outside their normal duties and presented it to him afterwards. What went to the Turin Salon in late 1965 was that bare rolling chassis: no body, no interior, the transverse V12 and gearbox visible on a drilled sheet-steel platform. Show visitors ordered it anyway, and Lamborghini, whose business case for the car had been thin, had a queue.

Gandini's Shape and the Ballasted Engine Bay Bertone took the commission and Marcello Gandini produced the body in roughly three months for the Geneva show of March 1966. The proportions came straight from the chassis, and the radiator was laid back in the nose like a contemporary racing car's. The prototype was finished so late that the engine had never been trial-fitted to the bay, so Geneva saw a Miura with the compartment filled with ballast and the rear clamshell locked shut. It did not matter: evo records seventeen orders over the Monaco Grand Prix weekend that followed, the moment the category later called the supercar acquired a market.

One Sump for Everything The packaging idea was borrowed from the Mini and executed at four times the cylinder count. Bizzarrini's 3,929 cc V12 was cast in unit with its five-speed gearbox and final drive and, on P400, P400 S and the first SVs, the whole assembly ran on one supply of oil. It saved length and height and it worked, but it circulated whatever the gearbox shed through the engine's bearings and forced a compromise between the oil an engine wants and the oil a gearbox wants. Owners who change the oil often enough report no trouble; the design was abandoned anyway. The chassis was equally daring - folded and welded sheet steel drilled for lightness, about 120 kg complete - and equally marginal, with the gauge raised from 0.9 mm to 1.0 mm from around the 125th car to stop it flexing.

The Faults the Series Kept Trying to Fix The Miura was quick and never entirely settled. The nose generated lift, and evo's account has it wandering alarmingly above about 150 mph, with brakes it calls inadequate and a chassis that flexed when pressed. The P400 S of December 1968 answered with more power - 370 CV, bigger inlet ports, 10.7:1 compression - ventilated discs partway through, and electric windows. The SV of 1971 went further: longer rear wishbones, a rear track widened to about 1,540 mm, nine-inch rear rims under flared arches, a stiffened structure and, on the later engines, a split sump that finally gave the gearbox its own oil and made a limited-slip differential practical. The eyelashes around the headlamps went. The nose lift was reduced rather than cured.

Jota, and the Cars Built to Look Like It In 1970 Bob Wallace built himself the car the factory would not race. The Jota used a light-alloy frame, lightweight panels, fuel tanks in the sills and a V12 reworked for something near 440 bhp, and weighed several hundred kilogrammes less than a road Miura. Lamborghini never entered it. It was sold to a private buyer and destroyed in a crash near Brescia within roughly a year, and the sources disagree on whether that was 1971 or 1972. What survives is imitation: a small number of factory SV/J conversions and a less well-defined population of cars modified in the same direction. The count of genuine factory SV/J cars is given as four, five or six depending on the authority.

Handing Over to the Countach Bertone showed the LP500 Countach prototype at Geneva in 1971, while the SV was still being built, and the production Countach LP400 arrived in 1974. The two are usually read as one lineage, but they are not the same engineering: the Miura is transverse-engined on a folded-steel platform with its gearbox in the sump, the Countach a longitudinal, gearbox-forward layout on a welded tubular spaceframe. The Miura is the more beautiful and the less resolved; the Countach had fifteen years of development. Both have production totals their manufacturer's own figures do not settle.

Corrosion of the sheet-steel structure is the defining liability. The battery tray, engine frame and floor pan are the known hotspots, and the guides are consistent that once rust is visible there is usually more inside the sections. Shiny paint over a rotten frame is a recognised trap, as is a frame pulled out of alignment by an old accident and never reset. The shared engine and gearbox oil on P400, P400 S and early SV cars means gearbox debris passes through the engine; the mitigation is frequent oil changes, and specialists report a well-maintained single-sump car used on the road gives no particular trouble. Neglected ones are a different matter. Gearboxes are slow to engage until warm and worn synchromesh is common. Four Weber carburettors out of balance make the car undriveable at low revs. Cars that sit develop seized calipers and corroded discs. Original fuel lines harden and crack, and ethanol content accelerates it, which is why owners seek ethanol-free fuel and carry an extinguisher. The plastic headlamp lift gears break with age, though brass replacements exist, and the Ducellier switchgear is poor.

Start with identity rather than condition. A large proportion of P400 and P400 S cars were upgraded towards S or SV specification over sixty years, and the Goodwood guide is blunt that anyone buying an SV should establish it is an original and not a standard car dressed to look like one. Lamborghini Polo Storico holds the factory archive of chassis, engine, gearbox and axle numbers with original colour, trim and equipment, and certifies cars built between 1963 and 2001, recording non-original components explicitly; Classic and Sports Car puts the cost at EUR 7,000 to EUR 10,000. A car with that paperwork is a different proposition from one without it. Establish where in the run the car sits: whether it is a pre- or post-ventilated-disc S, and for an SV whether the engine is a shared-sump or split-sump unit. On the car itself the frame is the expensive part. Look at the battery tray, the engine frame and the floors, and treat any rust found as a sample rather than the total. Check the frame is straight and that historic accident repair was done properly. Oil condition matters more than usual on a shared-sump car because that oil has also been through the gearbox. Expect a gearbox stiff until warm and some noise when cold; anything beyond that needs investigation, and most serious work is an engine-out job on this car.

As of August 2026, classic.com records a benchmark of $1,980,265 for the P400 with an average sale of $1,717,155, $2,175,551 for the P400 S, and $4,474,074 for the SV with an average of $3,839,844 - all trending upward, the SV carrying roughly double the benchmark of the earlier cars. Tracked results as of August 2026 run from $610,000 for a 1967 P400 in October 2024 to $6,605,000 for a 1972 SV at Broad Arrow's Amelia Concours sale on 7 March 2026, an original car in single ownership for 52 years that the house reported as beating the previous auction record for any Miura by more than $1,700,000. RM Sotheby's sold chassis 4946, a split-sump, air-conditioned, US-delivered SV, for EUR 3,942,500 at Milan on 22 May 2025 against a EUR 3.2 million estimate, and chassis 4840 - altered in the 1970s to imitate the Jota and returned to factory appearance in 2016 - for EUR 3,717,500 at Paris in late January 2026. RM Sotheby's Monterey in August 2026 took $3,030,000 for a 1967 P400. These are published sale totals, not hammer prices.