Four years after Drive-My’s exclusive reveal, Lamborghini confirms it’s the real deal
Lamborghini has finally verified Drive-My’s claim that the Lamborghini Miura P400 featured in Drive-My is indeed the car used for the opening sequence of the 1969 filmThe Italian Job. Two orange Miuras were used in the film: an already-damaged rolling shell, and the car that appears in all the driving shots. Following a tip-off from Cheshire Classic Cars proprietor Iain Tyrrell, who had bought a Miura that he believed to be the ‘hero’ car, Drive-My’s deputy editor Mark Dixon carried out extensive research to determine whether chassis #3586 is the very car that Roger Beckerman, played by Rossano Brazzi, drove up the Grand St Bernard Pass to the tones of Matt Monro singing On Days Like These – one of the most memorable moments in movie history.
Lamborghini historian Olivier Namèche and classic car broker Eric Broutin had already gathered a lot of evidence to support #3586’s claim to be the movie car, but there was one big problem: #3586 is clearly very original but it has white seats whereas those in the movie car were black. However, Dixon managed to speak with former Lamborghini employee Enzo Moruzzi, who delivered the Miura to The Italian Job production team, and he explained that the black seats were a temporary substitution so that the white seats would not get marked during filming.
‘I asked for them to be taken out, replacing them with a set of black leather seats that we used for testing,’ says Moruzzi. ‘The give a way was the headrests, which on the Miura are attached to the dividing glass between the driver compartment and the engine compartment, which couldn’t be replaced in time. In the film, you can see the original white headrests.’
Dixon then visited the Miura and photographed the dashboard, headlining and headrests, taking care to match the angles as closely as possible to frame-grabs from the movie. Superimposing the images in Photoshop showed that minute variations and flaws in the trim stitching were identical – something that would be almost impossible to fake. After filming, #3586 passed through several owners’ hands until it was bought last year by the Kaiser Collection in Liechtenstein, run by Classic Car Trust founder Fritz Kaiser. He approached Lamborghini Polo Storico to officially declare whether chassis #3586 was the movie car.
Which leaves one big question: what happened to the crumpled wreck that was bulldozed over a cliff, only to disappear a day later?
Top and above Now officially confirmed as the car from The Italian Job, Lamborghini Miura #3586 has remained in incredible low-mileage condition and still has its original interior.
