There's a photograph taken at the 1966 Geneva Motor Show that stops me every time I see it. A crowd of men in dark suits pressing towards a low, pale shape on a plinth, their faces tilted down as if they've spotted something alive on the ground. They are not admiring the car in the way you admire a display. They are trying to understand how it exists. That car was the Lamborghini Miura P400. And sixty years later, the question those men were silently asking — how does something look like this? — still doesn't have a satisfying answer.
Beauty in automotive design is usually explainable. You can trace the influences, name the references, point to the decision that made the difference. With the Miura, that process keeps failing. It looks the way it looks, and the best minds in car design have spent six decades trying to account for it.
The man who did it in three months
Marcello Gandini was 27 years old when Nuccio Bertone handed him the Lamborghini brief. He had just been promoted to chief designer at Carrozzeria Bertone after Giorgetto Giugiaro's departure — a position that, by any measure, he wasn't yet old enough to hold. The brief was straightforward in its ambition and impossible in its timeline: Lamborghini needed a body for its revolutionary transverse mid-engine chassis, and it needed it ready for the Geneva Motor Show in March 1966.
Gandini (pictured) completed the design, from first sketch to finished prototype, in three months.
What he produced was so precisely right that it's difficult to know where to begin describing it. The roof of the cabin sits just 110 centimetres above the ground. The bonnet is long and sharply pointed, the windscreen steeply raked. The famous "eyelashes" - the small grille elements that frame the pop-up headlights, gave the car a face that was simultaneously mechanical and alive. The rear clamshell, perforated by horizontal slats over the V12, functions as both cooling solution and visual statement. Not one element is decorative in isolation. Every detail earns its place and then earns something extra.
Ferruccio Lamborghini, a man not given to sentiment, saw the first drawings and reportedly said: "This one I like. With this we enter the legend." He was right on both counts.
What the Miura actually invented
It's worth being precise about what the Miura changed, because the word "revolutionary" is applied so freely that it loses meaning.
Before the Miura, high-performance road cars followed a single basic architecture: engine at the front, driven wheels at the rear, weight distributed accordingly. Grand tourers were longer, heavier, more formal. Ferrari, Aston Martin, Maserati — all beautiful, all built on the same fundamental premise. The Miura overturned that entirely. Its 3,929cc V12 was mounted transversely, behind the passenger compartment, sharing its oil with the gearbox in a single casting compact enough to fit where no road car engine had been placed before.
The term "supercar" was coined by automotive journalists to describe the Miura. Not as marketing language — they genuinely needed a new word, because no existing category was adequate.
The engineering was led by Gian Paolo Dallara and Paolo Stanzani, two young Lamborghini engineers who built the chassis on their own initiative, without Ferruccio's blessing, because they believed in the concept and were willing to bet their careers on it. The bare chassis was shown at the 1965 Turin Motor Show. The crowd assumed it was a racing car. Nobody imagined it was intended for the road. That misidentification was the point: the Miura would bring racing architecture to a car that its owner could drive to dinner.
Between 1966 and 1973, Lamborghini built 763 Miuras across three variants — the P400, the S, and the SV. Each generation refined the formula without altering the fundamental shape. The SV, with wider rear tyres, revised suspension and an independent gearbox lubrication system, was the most dynamically accomplished. The P400 was the purest. That distinction still drives auction results today: a 1972 Miura SV sold at Amelia Island in early 2026 for $6.6 million, setting a new public auction record.
The design question that doesn't go away
Here is the thing that complicates any clean narrative about the Miura's design: Marcello Gandini went on to produce some of the most important and distinctive cars in history - the Countach, the Lancia Stratos Zero, the Alfa Romeo Carabo, and none of them look like the Miura.
His subsequent work skews wedge-shaped, angular, aggressive. The Miura is fluid, low, almost organic in the way its surfaces transition. It belongs to a different aesthetic universe than almost everything else Gandini produced.
Some historians have quietly suggested that Giugiaro, Gandini's predecessor at Bertone, may have laid groundwork that shaped the Miura's character before he departed. We will never know with certainty. Gandini never confirmed it; Giugiaro never claimed it. What we know is that the car that went to Geneva was Gandini's work, and that it remains - in the view of designers, collectors, and observers who have spent their careers with automotive beauty, the highest single achievement of its form.
Flavio Manzoni, chief design officer at Ferrari, described Gandini, who died in March 2024, as "probably the greatest car designer ever." That verdict was built substantially on one car.
Why sixty years changes nothing
Every generation of automotive design produces cars that feel progressive in their moment and dated within a decade. The Miura does not behave this way. Photographs of it from 1966, 1986, 2006 and 2026 show the same object in the same light. Nothing about it signals its era in the way that contemporary cars inevitably do. It doesn't look like a 1960s car that has aged well. It looks like a car that arrived from somewhere time doesn't reach.
The pop-culture life of the Miura reinforced this quality. Miles Davis owned one. Elton John owned one. The opening sequence of The Italian Job was constructed around one, driving through an Alpine tunnel as if the scenery had been arranged specifically for the occasion. The car worked on screen for the same reason it works in a photograph or parked in a gallery: it is complete. Nothing needs to be added or removed. Nothing could be.
Living with it on the wall
Not many of us will sit in a Miura. The 763 that exist are held carefully by collectors who understand exactly what they have, and they are worth (at the low end) well over a million pounds. But there is a different way to understand a car of this quality, one that takes time and repeated exposure, and that is to live with its image.
Paul Ward's photograph of the Lamborghini Miura at Prescott Hill Climb is the image that started Limited100. Simon Wright, the company's founder, was searching for a high-quality Miura print for his own living room in 2020, found nothing that matched the car's standard, tracked down Paul Ward directly, and built a business around the conversation that followed. The photograph captures the Miura at rest between runs — the light finding the curve of the rear haunch, the car's extraordinary width relative to its height, the sense that it is barely contained by the circumstances around it.
Lamborghini Miura at Prescott Hill Climb is available now as a limited edition of 100 prints, in a range of sizes and materials, handcrafted in Britain with a certificate of authenticity. Once those 100 are gone, the edition is permanently closed.
It is, as Ferruccio Lamborghini put it, the legend.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the Lamborghini Miura considered the first supercar? The Miura, unveiled at the 1966 Geneva Motor Show, was the first mass-produced road car to feature a transversely mounted mid-engine V12; a layout previously reserved for racing cars. The combination of this engineering architecture with Marcello Gandini's low, dramatically proportioned body created a category of vehicle that existing terminology couldn't describe, which is why journalists coined the term "supercar" specifically for it.
Who designed the Lamborghini Miura? The Miura's body was designed by Marcello Gandini at Carrozzeria Bertone, completed from first sketch to finished prototype in approximately three months. The chassis was engineered by Gian Paolo Dallara and Paolo Stanzani at Lamborghini, with input from test driver Bob Wallace. The Miura debuted publicly as a bare chassis at the 1965 Turin Motor Show before the full car was unveiled at Geneva in 1966.
How many Lamborghini Miuras were made? Between 1966 and 1973, Lamborghini produced 763 Miuras across three variants: 265 P400s (1966–1968), approximately 338 P400 S models (1969–1971), and 150 P400 SVs (1971–1973). A small number of special versions also exist, including four SVJ models and a single factory Roadster prototype shown at the 1968 Brussels Motor Show.
What makes the Miura SV different from earlier versions? The Miura SV, introduced in 1971 as the final and most dynamically refined variant, featured wider rear tyres and enlarged rear arches, revised suspension geometry, an independent gearbox lubrication system (separated from the engine oil), and power increased to 385hp at 7,850rpm. It also lost the "eyelashes" around the headlights, a detail that, depending on your aesthetic convictions, is either a mark of maturity or the one thing the SV got wrong.
The Collector's Eye publishes monthly on the Limited100 blog. To explore the full range of limited edition Lamborghini wall art - including Paul Ward's Miura at Prescott Hill Climb, visit limited100.co.uk.