This is the first glimpse the world caught of the Lamborghini Miura, the car was unveiled at the Geneva Motorshow in 1966 to rapturous applause and has stood as a testament to the phenomenal automotive engineering talent of Lamborghini’s three top engineers, Bob Wallace, Gian Paolo Dallara and Paolo Stanzani.
We’ve decided to combine the top 11 features of 2011 onto a single page, partially because we have many readers now that we didn’t have at the start of the year, partially because 2011 has an 11 at the end of it, but mostly because we all love the film This Is Spinal Tap.
Bill Milliken is an astonishingly talented engineer, by the age of 19 he had already designed, built, flown and crashed his own aircraft, his fascination for machinery continued right through to the current day – he’s still alive and kicking at the age of 100.
This incredible photograph of Robert Benoist drifting his V-12 Delage around the 1924 French Grand Prix circuit is just about the most perfect motor racing picture I’ve yet seen.
The Ferrari Modulo was created by iconic automotive design firm Pininfarina in 1970 on commission from Ferrari, Ferrari at the time had a number of left over 512 S models that it couldn’t sell (or race) and so they gave one to Pininfarina and essentially said “make something wonderful”.
Aston Martin built the DB3 almost exclusively for racing between 1951 and 1953, only 10 of them were ever made with the chassis numbers 1-5 going to the factory works team and chassis’ 6-10 going to privateer teams in the UK.
This one-off 1947 Franay-Bentley Mark VI is widely considered to be the best (and most expensive) post-war Bentley ever made, that stunning and almost Bugatti-esque body was all hand made by French coach builder Franay. The car was first shown at the 1947 Paris Auto Show to world-wide acclaim.
The Porsche 550 Spyder is so low that during the 1954 Mille Miglia, former Formula 1 driver Hans Herrmann drove it at high speed under closed railroad crossing gates a few seconds before a passenger train flew by.
Group B Rally was introduced by the FIA in 1982 and quickly resulted in cars that blew the lid off anything that had ever raced on gravel in the past. The cars were the most technologically advanced vehicles the world had ever seen, they were lightweight, exceedingly powerful and staggeringly unsafe machines that performed, essentially, like a rally version of a Formula 1 car.