The Lamborghini Miura is proof that your boss needs to back off | Jason Cammisa Revelations | Ep. 19

[Applause] [Applause] [Music] hey you let me ask you a question how old are you okay don't answer that question because if i know how old you are i have to judge you and your life's accomplishments against those of the four guys who are responsible for the lamborghini in europe at the time that this car was debuted to the public in largely its final form gianpalo dalara its chief engineer senior engineer was 29 years old the whole team was so young they barely figured out how to play with their own wrenches they were 27 27 29 and 29 when they created this at that age the rest of us were busy perfecting the art of picking our noses or maybe i'm just projected [Music] the lamborghini mura was the world's first supercar and it was inspired by race cars one in particular which had just stolen the attention of the entire world the ford gt40 [Applause] but rather than get caught up in the no-win middle of the ford versus ferrari situation lamborghini's car was engineered so that it could go racing but it was developed solely for the street and it really did contradict everything automobile lamborghini stood for see this was not a company formed to build sports cars it was created by a man who wanted to make an italian rolls royce [Music] ferruccio lamborghini set out to make the world's best gts fast comfortable reliable free of annoyances he would say the exact opposite of his unreliable ferraris and unlike the ferraris which used old racing parts that were lying around lamborghinis would only use cutting edge technology so while ferrari's gts had a live rear axle lamborghinis would have fully independent suspension and while ferrari's v12 used a single overhead camshaft for bank ferruccio's would use two to make his v12 lamborghini first hired an ex-ferrari engineer who had been involved with little things like the 250 gto [Applause] and so lamborghini paid the young jotto betsarini a bonus for every horsepower his engine made more than ferraris but ferruccio didn't specify how that engine needed to make power pizzerini's three and a half liter quadcam v12 made 358 horsepower at 9 800 rpm i don't see a problem with that but ferruccio did because remember fergio was trying to build a gt car not a formula one car and so he fired pizzerini and left the two children stanzani and dalara in charge of re-engineering the v-12 to work in a road car it made its debut in the 1964 350 gt which by most accounts was a better gt than ferrari's gts but it was also a showroom dud as was its replacement a slightly more conventionally styled 400 gt with the v12 now punched out to just under 4 liters meanwhile back at the lamborghini kindergarten stanzani and delara are joined by another fetus 25 year old new zealander bob wallace who was hired to be a troubleshooting mechanic on the production line and the three kids were enthralled with the idea of going racing but ferruccio would have absolutely nothing to do with it he was however a master delegator and so his style was to hire incredibly talented people and stand back and let them do what they did best and the three fetuses came up with the idea of a small mid-engine sports car inspired by the ford gt the problem was the lamborghini v12 is enormous it's 43 inches long and there was no way they could fit it in a small little car like this so they took inspiration from the then new mini and they turned it around by 90 degrees creating a transverse v12 and 5 speed end differential that's all in one unbelievably complicated casting that barely fit in this chassis look at how tight that is i'm working on this thing the frame itself was incredibly simple to produce sheet steel folded with holes punched out for weight savings just like they did in airplanes the lara was an aeronautical engineer and it shows the chassis weighed only 155 pounds in show form the resulting rolling chassis was rolling art of course this had nothing to do with the type of cars that ferruccio lamborghini wanted to build but he went along with it let the kids be kids and thought it'll be a great marketing stunt to help me sell my big fat gts it'll be the world's first transverse mid-engined rolling chassis they schlepped the thing to the 1965 turin auto show and lamborghini was right the rolling chassis did create orders 10 of them amounting to almost as many cars as the company had sold the entire previous year problem is none of those orders were for the gt 10 people plunked down a deposit on the mid-engine chassis with no body on it a normal man might have been worried but ferruccio lamborghini wasn't a normal man he was kind of the opposite of enzo ferrari enzo didn't go to car shows he openly detested the buyers of his cars he was universally regarded as prickly ferruccio on the other hand well he was a pimp there's one account of ferruccio at that turin auto show that i think demonstrates this particularly well ferruccio walks in proudly down the middle of one of the aisles with and i quote a staggeringly beautiful girl on each arm in each of his hands was an ice cream cone she had a lick he had a lick she had a lick he held it she had a lick she had a lick he had a lick they all had a lick and yet despite ferruccio getting 10 deposits paid on a car that didn't exist yet lest we forget all the licking it was someone else who really won the day at that show and that someone was marcelo gandini because he worked for bertone who won the contract to design a body for that rolling chassis but here's the thing the day of that show was marcelo gandini's second day on the job and he was just 27 years old but then he went away and designed this car in less than two days are you freaking kidding me [Music] it took about a week to do a full-size drawings and then another week to do a full-size buck and then about a month to actually build the full-size prototype just five months after the raw chassis was shown in turin the gandini designed p400 mura was rolled onto the bertone stand at the geneva auto show in march of 1966 it all happened so fast that even ferruccio didn't see the car until he got there and when he looked at it he said man maybe like 10 or 20 people a year would want to buy one of those 30 more orders were taken on the spot at the show god is it gorgeous which meant ferruccio now had a small mob on his hands of people who wanted a car that had been cobbled together by a bunch of overgrown teenagers that mob kept growing by the end of the year more than 75 people had deposits down meanwhile the kids are working overtime just trying to get this thing engineered and then ready for production and somehow they pulled it all off deliveries began in earnest only about a year later oh look a fire extinguisher that's called foreshadowing kids here's the craziest part when the mural was conceived lamborghini was a company of just 78 people including 41 shop floor workers 17 white collar staff and 20 apprentices that's it this wasn't some established car company with tens of thousands of employees and yet they were able to take the idea of a mid-engine supercar into production in only two years and by all accounts the reason for it was that ferruccio got out of the way and let his young talented employees just do what they do best he wasn't an engineer so he couldn't do the work himself but when the guys were still working at one in the morning he showed up with food for them ferruccio nurtured his team rather than whipping them like enzo did the first cars off the production line were disasters because the customers were the beta testers so lamborghini wisely chose to deliver the first cars to customers in italy so they could return to the factory for servicing there ferruccio himself would take them to a long long long dinner meanwhile back at the factory the guys were tearing the cars completely apart sometimes making major structural changes to the cars that they never told the customer about virtues over there no have another bottle of vino no another course of course you cannot do manga keep eating hope those guys are finished many of the car's inherent shortcomings were addressed over time with continual updates and then with the final miura sv which had a completely redesigned rear suspension with five inches of extra rear track some of the problems were never fixed at all including the really big ones like for example this engine becomes starved for oil in long corners and then seizes that happened to this car twice see its original owner was an abarth works driver who was driving it on the banking at manza and the engine ceased and so he crashed it and then he sends it back to lamborghini and they build him a new one and it happens again but the second crash was so big that lamborghini just built him an all-new car from the ground up using the same serial number presumably so he didn't have to pay sales tax on it this is that replacement car another legendary miura problem was catching fire due to the carburetor design this one burnt three times the last one so severely that it took the owner 30 years to get around to fixing it oh don't worry it's not like it doesn't have positives to outweigh the finicky little stuff and besides look at it it's tiny it's the size of a subaru brz in length and width but then 10 inches lower you could step on it by mistake to put the fire out and it was fast luckily it wasn't quite as fast as lamborghini's quoted 186 mile an hour top speed because the miura's front end actually took flight around there and i don't mean the front end got light i mean it came completely off the ground and crashed and burned because you know that's what mirrors do over the years horsepower numbers swelled from 350 to 370 and then to 385 horsepower but some of that might have been typical italian make-believe because according to development engineer bob wallace they never did any substantive improvements to this engine whatsoever and they all made between 320 and 330 horsepower but that was enough because the mural was light rodent tracks test car weighed just 2 900 pounds so it was really quick and it was also really fast at 168 miles an hour this was the fastest car road and track had ever tested which is appropriate considering it generated the most skid pad grip they'd ever seen ever but it was a difficult one inside the mura is to put it bluntly experience overload it's too much of everything and that's not always a good thing the great irony here is that it was exactly the opposite of the hassle-free car ferruccio set out to build and to make matters worse it didn't make money for lamborghini so one night in 1967 ferruccio decided to pull the plug on all of automobile lamborghini and at one o'clock in the morning he called assistant engineer stanzani to his house he was by the way now 30 years old and said he was going to shut down lamborghini unless tanzani agreed to take over operations you want to talk about the ultimate delegation of responsibility he handed over the keys stanzani eventually accepted on one condition you are the boss of the company i know that however you will not come and create dissent override me in front of people or put your nose in things understand that you'll be able to ask me anything but speak only with me and amazingly ferruccio agreed so what did stanzani do with all of that freedom well he teamed back up with gandini and made the freaking countach what else is there to say other than to quote gandini himself who said that to create exceptional things you must have complete freedom tell that to your bosses the next time they stand in your way maybe then you'll make something exceptional like that no it's too late you're already too old you're fine [Music] [Music] [Music] uh room [Music] okay so you're just gonna keep the ferrari framed out the entire time right yep okay action i'm not some rich youtuber asking you to like and subscribe hey up up up up up up up up up up up keep the ferrari out i'm an automotive journalist asking you to like and subscribe and that's because that's how youtube works if you don't click those buttons youtube doesn't know you liked what you've just seen and isn't going to show you any more of it and if you don't like what you've just seen well join the club and by that i mean the hagerty drivers club which gets you access to this award-winning magazine as well as discounts on amazing stuff and if if you still don't like what you've seen well then just leave a nasty comment because that's how the internet works i need to go clean that up

Channel: Hagerty

Views: 1,224,172

Keywords: Hagerty, Classic Car, Classic Cars, Hagerty Drivers Club, collector car, enthusiast car, collector cars, Muira, Lambo, camisa, camissa, motor trend, harrys garage, petrolicious, issimi, dts, jay leno, countach, top gear, donut, forza, enzo, sound, noise, pov, history, Derek tam-scott, hyphen, giallo fly, yellow, gated manual, fire, burn, engine seize, P400, Geneva, doug, demuro, Doug demuro, muira, miura sv, miura s, million dollar, hypercar, supercar, first supercar

Id: io0zK9Kb9gQ

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 27 2022