Lamborghini Makers Produces Vehicles Of Tomorrow

A century after its founder’s birth, Lamborghini produces the vehicles of tomorrow by celebrating its storied past...

- Dan Carney

Like superheroes, every great company has a founding myth. Automobili Lamborghini’s origin story centers around a clash of mid-century Italian industrial titans: Ferruccio Lamborghini and Enzo Ferrari. Lamborghini was a successful entrepreneur who, legend has it, decided to reward himself for creating his eponymous tractor-manufacturing company with the purchase of a Ferrari sports car. But the clutch of his new possession proved troublesome, and when Lamborghini had his own company’s engineers troubleshoot the problem, he called for a meeting with Ferrari to offer the technical solution.

The imperious Enzo Ferrari was outraged that a tractor maker would deign to tell him how to design his sports cars, and he sent Lamborghini on his way, telling him to focus on what he knew best. Instead, Lamborghini returned to Sant’Agata, outside Bologna, resolved to build sports cars that would show Ferrari how it should be done. He warmed up with a couple of conventional 1960s-style models, starting with the 350GT in 1964.

But Lamborghini the company became the Lamborghini we know today — an iconoclastic builder of futuristic fantasy cars — with the intro duction of the Miura at the Geneva International Motor Show in 1966. The Miura is rightly called the world’s first supercar because it established the mold for those that followed by locating the vehicle’s sonorous 350-horsepower 4.0-liter V-12 behind the cockpit rather than ahead of the windshield. Today, the Miura lives on as the Aventador — Lamborghini’s flagship midengine V-12 supercar. The lineage from the Miura to its successor models, the Countach, Diablo, Murciélago, and Aventador, is unbroken. The Miura’s midengine configuration provided superior balance and followed the conversion of Formula 1 racers from a front-engine to a midengine layout.