We found a Lamborghini Miura in an actual barn!

we recently told a story about a lost mirror sv that we couldn't find and i realized that we had never told probably one of the coolest stories that we've we've encountered on our own channel uh i think we told this story on vinwicki once but to date we've actually owned eight mirrors um the myriad of svs and p400 and s examples but ironically the first mirror that we had ever owned um i found by pure chance in a barn so when we first started i was scouring the internet at all times of the night and just constantly looking for cars and we had done a few deals we had done a countach deal we had done a diablo deal and one day um and let me preface this with the fact that at the time we probably had a couple hundred thousand dollars to play with so we were we were much smaller than the place we are today we didn't really have much even operating cash i didn't have much money we were a small small company and you could call this even before the official launch of curated we were using the name and maybe you know buying a car here or there so i'm scrolling on the internet and uh i find on ebay of all places this little ad for a 1967 lamborghini mura ss and the ad was it it was not well written in the sense that some of the facts were incorrect i believe it was they were asking 1.25 million so within line with you could say amira s price but the biggest thing was the photos were horrible so it was these um photos that someone had cropped incorrectly so they were very very tiny and obviously there's no such thing as a mira s s there's a mirror s um but there was never an ss or any special car produced so i took note of it honestly the ad looked sort of maybe like a fraud or a scam and i took a picture of the ad and i went about my day and that night i'm in bed and i go you know what i should pursue that you never know who knows what it could be so i quickly go back to it i i click on the the user's name and i go to reach and send a message um and and i can't remember exactly but i think at some point immediately or before that the ad was taken down but i did have the user on ebay his contact information so i sent a message through ebay and i get a message right back you know hey um yes i'm selling the car for my boss blah blah blah i would love to talk to you so i end up i get on the phone with this gentleman who was a very nice guy you could tell his his knowledge for cars was somewhat limited and you know i'm trying to talk him through this process the one thing i knew and the one thing that stood out to me in this ebay ad was there was a vin number and the number was four digits now if you don't know mira's i don't think you would ever know um how muravin numbers are created they were essentially four digits uh you know some of the first cars were like one zero zero seven but most of the cars were three four six oh and then you know the last cars were 500 etc so you could tell you know between three thousand and five thousand what amira vin looks like and what's funny is when i saw that in the vin number i said okay there's maybe there's something here um now when i did run that bin nothing came up on the car there was really no history on the car so i did know that that part might have been real um and i'm talking to this guy and he's telling me it's a it's a special example and blah blah blah blah blah and i asked him do you have any better photos can you send me some cell phone photos so a couple hours go by and my phone starts getting unloaded with photos and i realized quickly okay this is a real miura s um it's definitely not a scam i mean these you know no one could create a mirror s from scratch and and put it in a barn and make it look like this so it's a real car so there's something here so immediately i start doing some research i'm on the phone with him we're negotiating now he tells me that his boss needs to close in like a week or in two days because the boss had some sort of financial commitment and he was selling everything he also had a maserati ghibli ironically it was an ss and i think that's why he put an ss on the miura but um so he was he was in the process of just getting rid of everything so without even having the money i quickly told him done we have a deal we agreed to a price um and i said i would send him a deposit and i forget what it was maybe it was 72 hours or something like that now remarkably at the time i had a dinner planned uh about a day or two later with my now business partner who who really helped us grow and he helped us get our bank financing and our funding and brought us to where we are today and um it came up in our dinner conversation about this mira and he's not a car guy but he's a business guy and he's a sharp guy and he really liked jordy and myself my managing partner and uh he asked us about you know what deals do you have going or what's going on and we told them about this mirror and jordy was who's our finance guy who at the time was raising money from investors and he was managing our money was was basically telling him man this this guy is crazy john's crazy he signed a purchase agreement he's planning to buy this car we don't even have the money so uh alan who was not our partner at that point he later became our partner started laughing and i'll never forget he picks up a backpack at our dinner and he takes out his checkbook and he writes us a 50 000 check as a deposit for this car and he tells jordy he says okay now it's your job to go raise the rest of the money and he tells me it's your job to go buy and sell this car so what a momentous moment i mean i think we were about to cry because we were this is seven eight years ago in our careers and um i think both of us were struggling at the time but we were just starting this new company and uh we obviously we take the deposit money we place the deposit on the car and we start scrambling to raise the rest of the money geordi raises the money um he had some friends and family investors who believed in what we were doing and i started scheduling flights to new york so at the time um what i what i didn't realize was where i was actually going i i called a friend of mine wayne who had a limo company and the easiest way you know i didn't want to go rent a car i wanted really to focus on just buying this mirror so i said hey do you have a driver that can pick me up and bring me to this location and he starts laughing he goes you're going in the middle of nowhere in new york i mean like to a corn field i said no no it'd be fine so he picks me up at the airport and we start driving and we're driving we're driving an hour now out of new york city and it's just like barns and corn barns and more trees and we're nowhere so at this point i'm trying to call the gentleman that was managing this transaction for his boss and i have no cell phone service and it starts to like give me this weird feeling in my stomach that maybe i was just taken for fifty thousand dollars um you know and i definitely listen i verified i saw a copy of the title and i saw like documents but still at that moment this was one of our first deals it was a lot of money for us and i had to think like back to the ebay ad and like could it be a fraud ends up we get in a right location the guy calls me goes hey i actually see you guys you're right down the street from a barn okay so we see this barn we pull up to the barn and if i'm not mistaken it was like this big white barn and uh he he gets one of the the barn hands to open the doors and i'm staring at literally what is farm equipment and a snow blower and all these different things and this mirror um which was a a mural red which is like orangish red sitting almost like uh in the sense of someone forgot about it from 1970 um and dust and you know there was a blanket on top and there's things on top of this mirror just sitting in the middle of the barn and i'm astonished i mean i think i was so excited to discover this car i forgot about even inspecting it it was like you know i'm taking photos and doing all this stuff so i'm looking at the car and i realized that listen this is a really well preserved car um at some point apparently the owner who is a big guy in the stock world in the 70s um he was a young guy you could see there was a rolling stones tape i mean you ca i can't even imagine being a young guy in the 1970s driving a mura s you know around new york and and listening to the rolling stones i mean it it really brought me to that that moment in time um but he had redone the interior in probably 1970 and what was odd about the car was it had these glass louvers in the rear um now there had always been uh rumors of maybe bob estes who was the distributor for a lamborghini creating a few mirrors with glass louvers when you looked at the louvers they were very well constructed um there was no one that could tell us it was it was it it looked like it could have been done at the factory but there was no proof it was done at the factory we believe and after speaking to actually jim kaminski from the lamborghini club that it could have been done by the u.s distributor so so here was this car and the car obviously didn't run but we checked the engine we put in gear and pushed it so the engine did turn and and really you know the paint had some cracking but it was all complete um and we decided okay let's move forward with it let's buy the car so we ended up funding this car a couple days later um we brought the car to miami and we and we took some incredible photos and what a a incredible well-preserved example of a car with mostly original paint it had its original interior from the replacement in the 1970s it was originally i believe a black interior somebody replaced it with like this white color a white and gray color interior but it had its antenna it had on the um the the the uh the break reservoir there's a cap that goes on the the actual the the cover for the reservoir and it still had its original protectant cover it had a lot of cool features that you know when mirrors got restored over the years they were gone um so you could tell it was an untouched car so then it was our job to get it started so we we i actually at this point we didn't have our restoration shop we didn't have our guys here so i sent it up to my father i begged and pleaded um he retired many years ago and he agreed to get it running so after a few days he drained all the fuel put fresh plugs and it started to crank and uh he what he realized was it didn't want to turn over and then finally he got it to to run and then guess what a a mouse and all these different like petrified artifacts came out of the exhaust so that's actually why it didn't want to start um and and he just said okay i got it running it just it obviously needs everything else um it hadn't run since the 1970s um and we were trying to put together the whole story and apparently the owner had purchased the car and then he had literally in 1971 just put it away um i think he had dented something on the front bumper and he got annoyed and he and he literally just let the car sit so it was an incredible story and what makes it sort of even funnier is how the story evolved and and the reason i say that is is and this might be the funniest part of the story is um you know i took these cool photos um this was uh before we were using our our current photographer albert at the time um now we'll send him on different missions but i brought a uh i think i had a nikon d something and i brought it and i took a couple photos and and they they came out really you know they came out cool um so we ended up selling the car it went to a famous nhl hockey player a sweet guy and then at some point he decided to resell the car so when the car was being sold again um the story sort of evolved and people were calling me about this car and there was actually a few guys in the auction world that were claiming that they had discovered the car by buying a snow blower or looking for an ad for a snow blower so the story evolved and everyone started to use my photos and i'm like wait a minute no no i actually discovered this car and i'm the one that we had owned it at one point um i think the last story i heard from a gentleman direct from his mouth was that he was looking in craigslist classifieds and he found a snowblower and when he went to go pick it up he found the mirror which obviously i knew was not true um and i laughed and and actually the car ended up selling at me come auction uh for about i think it was like just over 1.1 or 1.2 million um and and i've never seen the car since um i had i had followed sort of its history i'm i'm i can imagine it might be being restored today um or maybe someone left it original um but it was definitely a momentous moment for us to discover the car purchase the car sell it and it's probably one of the reasons that we ended up partnering with allen you

Channel: Curated TV by John Temerian

Views: 57,831

Rating: 4.8906713 out of 5

Keywords: lamborghini, miura, barn find, polo historico

Id: y8XeuhgjdNM

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021