THE GREATEST

Join us as we celebrate six decades of Lamborghini with time behind the wheel of the sublimely sensational Miura SV

- Richard Heseltine

The landscape is charged with a sense of mystery. It's almost filmic, flinty shards dotting the Serra do Caramulo landscape amid sage-stippled pastels. It's also deserted, which is just as well, as our presence would otherwise have a sore-thumb resonance. A Lamborghini Miura SV announces your impending arrival. You hear the car long before you see it. And let's be honest, matters have taken a turn for the juvenile, or adolescent at the very least. On these roads, in this car, it's hard not to picture the opening scene of a certain British heist flick. It's harder still to quell the impulse to murder the Matt Monro classic that accompanies it.

But that's the thing about the Miura: it invites romanticism. Nothing about this car is in the realm of the ordinary. It hasn't lost the power to shock, either: onlookers stare in a kind of poleaxed silence. With Lamborghini, myth and reality often lap, not least the small matter of how and why the marque came into being 60 years ago, but just be glad that it did. What is telling is that it swam out confidently against the prevailing tide despite its relative youth. It was barely three years old when the Miura first emerged fully formed, let's not forget.

Ferruccio Lamborghini got a taste for car-building in the immediate post-war years after he opened a small garage in Cento. There he took a secondhand Fiat Topolino and created a two-seater barchetta before entering it in the June 1948 Mille Miglia. His race ended 700 miles in, after he crashed into a restaurant. Nevertheless, his small business adapting wartime vehicles for agricultural use soon became a large one. That led to him establishing Lamborghini Trattrici and by the mid1950s his firm was one of Italy's foremost manufacturers of tractors.