Italian Job Miura for sale

Right at the start of the classic 1969 car-chase epic, The Italian Job, a Lamborghini Miura falls foul of mafia heavies and is pushed off a cliff to its destruction.

Except the Miura didn’t die as it was pushed off the Passo Gran San Bernardo mountainside and it’s now for sale in England, attracting offers of €1.4 million.

Even without its Italian Job heritage (no, not the rubbish Mark Wahlberg one), the orange Miura would still be a classic, being one of just 275 P400 models ever built.

The car has been put up for sale by Cheshire Classic Cars, who bought it off Italian businessman Norberto Ferrety after inspecting it in an underground car park in Paris.

Two Mudras were used in the opening sequence of the film, with Matt Monroe singing On Days Like These in the background, but while one of them was pushed off the cliff, it wasn’t this one.

“The fact that it has been confirmed as the car from The Italian Job makes it potentially the most famous Lamborghini in the world,” co-owner Iain Tyrrell said.

Tyrrell insisted he’d checked the P400’s serial number to confirm with Lamborghini that it had been leased by Paramount to use in the movie.

Tyrrell is the car’s fifth owner over the past 46 years, yet the 276km/h supercar still has less than 20,000km on the odometer.

Despite years of high-performance Ferrari road cars, the rear-drive Miura is widely considered to be the world’s first supercar, with its V12 engine mounted across the engine bay behind the driver and a body that began the legend of Bert one’s Marcello Gemini as a designer.

The 4.26 meter-long two-seater stood just 1050mm high and weighed only 1125kg. Its 3.9-litre V12 delivered 260kW of power and 355Nm of torque in base P400 spec, good for a sprint to 60mph in seven seconds.