The Spanish bull referred to as the Miura may have first entered the pop culture lexicon with the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s enduring 1926 classic The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway’s disaffected expatriates travel to Spain to watch the bullfights, and there they are impressed by the brutal capabilities of the Miura, a creature that is muscular, powerful, lithe, and menacing.Forty years later, Ferruccio Lamborghini introduced his automotive interpretation of the Miura, and in every way the new model lived up to the values of its namesake. Replete with all the grace and power of Pamplona’s bulls, the Miura P400 was a revolutionary sports car in every sense, from its transversely positioned mid/rear-mounted V-12 engine, to the sinewy and voluptuous coachwork designed by Bertone’s Marcello Gandini.After progressing through the P400 S iteration unveiled at the Geneva Salon in March 1970, the Miura underwent one final development introduced in Geneva a year later. The resulting Miura P400 SV was available by special order only, and the SV (or Spinto Veloce) nomenclature instantly clarified that this was the most mechanically advanced Miura to emerge from Sant’ Agata Bolognese.
To accommodate fiercer performance, the chassis was reinforced and the rear suspension was improved with larger wishbones. In combination with the fitting of larger wheels, this resulted in a wider rear track that necessitated sculpting wider rear fenders, adding further muscular character to Gandini’s original design. The proprietary Lamborghini V-12 was further tuned to develop 385 horsepower, a dividend of an additional 15 horsepower over the concurrent P400 S.
Among a combined output of approximately 900 total examples built, the P400 SV was built in a relatively modest quantity of 150 examples, making it the rarest of the three Miura variants. To this day the model remains prized by discerning collectors for its uprated performance and elevated cosmetics, signifiers of the most highly developed and advanced version of Lamborghini’s legendary bull.
