Page 9 - Marcello Gandini Maestro of Design Revisited

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39
 As we can see in this image from the French lÕAutomobile
magazine, the engine didn’t have any carburetors, so that story of
Nuccio Bertone driving to Geneva with a secretary as a passenger
was just another one from the fertile imagination of a raconteur.
L’AUTOMOBILE MAGAZINE
 (BOTH) The beautifully finished wooden buck used to beat out
the panels for the Miura prototype became a prop for fashion
shoots. ARCHIVIO CENTRALE DELLO STATO/STILE BERTONE
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Andalusia, the farm is run by the Miura family, and is one of
the oldest and most famous of the Spanish “ganaderías.”
Although the usual process of prototyping a new design
in the tradition of the Italian coachbuilders of the epoch
was followed, several activities were happening almost
simultaneously. As the 1:1 scale full-sized body profile
drawings were being developed by draftsmen Venanzio
de Biase and Giulio Bianchini from Gandini’s 1:10 scale
orthogonal drawings, work had also begun on the
wooden cross-sectional buck, from which the steel body
panels were to be formed by the age-old method of
hammering out the shape.
As time was tight, the team had to work “through
Christmas and the New Year, through weekend after
weekend, without a break,” remembered Gandini, “until
the day before the show was to open, when three cars
were trucked to Geneva overnight.”
The 1966 Geneva Motor Show opened on Thursday, March
10 and the Miura was an absolute sensation, becoming
the undisputed star of the show.
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sell a total of about fifty of his exotic supercars. Despite
his admiration for the project, Nuccio Bertone expected
that no more than twenty units would be made. Both men
were wrong. Eventually Lamborghini built 762 Miuras, in
three series, and with the sensational Miura, Lamborghini
became a household name across the globe.
“The Miura stands for a kind of beauty that lies in merging
opposites,” explains its designer, “It is a body with lots of
muscles, but they are the muscles of a beautiful woman,
not a male body builder. It is wicked, but with some gentle
touches. It has lots of edges but all the curves in the right
places. The stare is aggressive, but tempting, the car is
intimidating, but attractive.” And impossible to resist.
By the end of the Geneva Motor Show, many of the
rich and the beautiful had lined up to order a Miura, and
Ferruccio Lamborghini bet Nuccio Bertone that he would
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At the same time, the Lamborghini Miura announced
the advent of a brilliant designer, who for the next five
decades would have an extraordinary influence on the
design and development of the automobile.
DALTON WATSO