The Supercar

By placing the engine behind the driver, the Lamborghini Miura fused physics and beauty into a single silhouette and created a new category: the supercar. Engineering and art were no longer in tension — they had become the same pursuit.

Unveiled as a bare chassis at Turin in 1965 and complete at Geneva in 1966, the Lamborghini Miura placed a 3.9-litre V12 sideways behind the driver — a configuration borrowed from the racetrack and never before sold for the road. Marcello Gandini’s body, drawn at Bertone, remains one of the most beautiful shapes ever pressed in steel.

At close to two hundred and eighty kilometres an hour it was the fastest production car of its day, and it gave the world a new word: the supercar. Every mid-engined marque since — the shape, the drama, the placement of the engine — descends from this one car.