Lamborghini "encierra" five Miuras at Pebble Beach

Five very special units of the legendary Lamborghini Miura will gather at the 59th Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Each one of them holds a story.

The Lamborghini Miura is one of my favourite cars of all time. The sports car created by Marcello Gandini, presented at the Geneva Motor Show in 1966, has always captivated me with its spectacular design, the technical solutions it offered for its era, its V12 engine, and the history of rivalry between Ferruccio Lamborghini and Enzo Ferrari…

This is a car that was the fastest production sports car of its time, of which 763 units were built between 1966 and 1973, and which is increasingly valued by collectors and classic car enthusiasts.

Now, Lamborghini announces that it will display no fewer than five very special examples of the Miura in an area dedicated to this iconic model, on the occasion of the Concours d’Elegance taking place during the Monterey Car Week.

The five Lamborghini Miuras of Pebble Beach

The first of these five exceptional cars is the Lamborghini Miura P400 chassis number 3087, whose first owner was Swiss racing driver Karl Foitek. It is unit 22 of the 25 original production cars. Foitek owned it from 1967 until 1972, when it was acquired by a second buyer, who enjoyed it for 40 years. The current owner bought it in October 2018 and had it restored by experts at Lamborghini in the United States.

Another Miura P400, unit 10, with chassis number 3303, was delivered in February 1968 to the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The history of this Lambo is particularly curious. The Shah ordered it with chrome bumpers, a special steering wheel and some other “whims”, such as studded tyres, to drive on snow at one of his villas in St. Moritz. The car was confiscated from its second owner after the revolution the country suffered in 1979, and for 30 years it belonged to the new Shah. It was restored in 2018, and its current owner acquired it in early 2019.

We first reported on the third Lambo we will see at Pebble Beach not long ago, when we discussed the location of the Lamborghini Miura used in filming The Italian Job, after more than 50 years of searching. Now, this unit will be shown with certification that it is indeed the car used during the scene in the iconic film starring Michael Caine.

Another of the Lambos gathering at Pebble Beach is the Miura SV acquired by Jean Todt in 2016, which was shown at Rétromobile Paris 2019 after restoration work completed the previous year. This unit is one of the 150 Miura SVs built. Its first owner was Arthur Mechin, a RAF pilot who lived in South Africa, where the car stayed for 30 years before being acquired by an American buyer in 2001.

Finally, the “lot” is closed by another Miura SVR, in this case a car that was built as a Miura S and shown at the Turin Motor Show in 1968, before being sold in Italy. Heinz Steber bought it in 1974 and took it to Germany, where in 1975 he asked the factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese to carry out a special preparation that took 18 months of work.

Steber subsequently sold it to a Japanese collector. Its current owner acquired it in 2016, and the department in charge of restoring historic vehicles at Lamborghini has returned it to its original state, just as it was delivered in 1975.