L
Late in 1971, a telex arrived at the Ministry of the Royal Family in
Tehran from the Iranian embassy in Rome: “We are sending you
details of an exciting new Lamborghini which the Shah will like.
It has 4,600cc, 490bhp and can do 300km/h.” Despite the price
—$33,000, an astronomical sum for a car in 1971—the reply soon
came from Tehran: “He has accepted this. Tell them to order.”
The “exciting new Lamborghini” was the very first Miura
SVJ and the Shah was, of course, the deeply westernised Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran from 1941 until the
1979 revolution. He was a man famous for his playboy lifestyle
and passion for fast, exotic cars. No one knows the extent of his
wealth, but he was among the world’s richest royals. Nor is it
known how many cars he had, but it’s thought that by 1979 he’d
accumulated a staggering 2,000 automobiles.
The Shah was the first car collector in the Middle East, and
the cherished occupants of his garage—from Rolls-Royce to
Ferrari, Maserati to Mercedes, Lamborghini to Porsche—were
far from the sterile, cosseted inhabitants of a static museum. The
Shah drove them enthusiastically, to the full... at night, on the
roads around Tehran. What better car to match this life of rakish
glamour and disreputable thrills than the Lamborghini Miura?
The Shah clearly agreed, as over the course of his collecting life
he acquired no fewer than four of them, the first being an early
P400 and the last and most precious, a genuine SVJ.
So what makes this car so special, so valuable? To understand
what the SVJ symbolised, you first have to appreciate the essence
of any Miura. Run your eyes over those low-slung, sensuous
curves and it’s easy to see why the Miura—named after a fero-
cious breed of fighting bull—is so often voted the sexiest car of
all time. When the prototype Miura P400 made its debut at the
March 1966 Geneva Salon, it caused a sensation.
Admittedly I’m writing this as a shameless Miura obsessive.
I was eight years old when I first saw The Italian Job—and the
opening scenes, with that 12-cylinder orange missile scyth-
ing through the Swiss mountains, sparked a lifelong (and
very expensive) love affair. It wasn’t just the Miura’s aesthet-
ic beauty, nor the fact that those were the same roads along
which I was driven, each term, to boarding school in Switzer-
land (in a rather more prosaic BMW saloon, with my father
also wearing vintage shades and smoking filterless cigarettes,
but... somehow not quite the same). It was the era that itRED BULL
The Shah of Iran’s 1971 Lamborghini Miura SVJ, which
holds the record for the most valuable Lamborghini
ever sold and now lives in a European collection.
Right: the car was discovered by Simon Kidston in Dubai
in 1996, with its then-owner and the Shah’s other carsVANITY FAIR EN ROUTE
09-19Simon-Kidson-Lamborghini.indd 65 17/07/2019 13:24