Lamborghini Espada

Gandini built the Espada out of two of his own 1967 show cars. The Lamborghini Marzal supplied the glasshouse thinking and the hexagonal motifs that run through the Series I interior. The Bertone Pirana, built for a British newspaper on a Jaguar E-Type chassis, supplied the proportions. The signature is the tail. It is cut off vertically and filled with a glass panel, so the car ends in a flat glazed face rather than a taper, and rearward vision is genuinely good. Combined with the flat roof and the low nose, it gives the Espada a silhouette that reads as a shooting brake from some angles and a very long coupe from others. Opinion divided at the 1968 Geneva launch and has never entirely reunited. Series III lost some of the strangeness: square-mesh grille, restyled instruments, Alfa Romeo 1750 Berlina tail lights in place of the earlier units. The name is the matador's sword, which is as close as a four-seater gets to the bull-naming convention.

None, and by design. Ferruccio Lamborghini built the company to beat Ferrari on the road and refused to go racing throughout his ownership, which is why Giotto Bizzarrini's V12 was detuned by Gian Paolo Dallara before a single customer car was built. The policy outlasted him. Lamborghini did not field a factory-developed race car until the Diablo SV-R in 1996. Even without that policy, the Espada had nowhere to go. It was a 1,630 kg four-seat grand tourer in an era when GT racing had moved to two-seat homologation specials, and no series existed that it could have entered without being comprehensively outclassed. The Jensen Interceptor and Maserati's four-seaters faced the same wall. The engine did the competing instead. The same 3,929 cc V12 architecture, in the Miura, provoked Bob Wallace's Jota and the six SV/J cars that followed, and in enlarged form it eventually reached Group C in the Countach QVX. The Espada simply carried the mildest version of it and took four people to lunch.

The Espada was a working car for people who could afford anything, and its cultural trail reflects that. Paul McCartney bought one, a right-hand-drive 1972 Series III in red over red leather with the manual gearbox, which is about as good an endorsement as a four-seat V12 can get. Italian cinema used it heavily through the 1970s, most visibly in Flatfoot in 1973, and it turns up across European film and television that decade in numbers no other Lamborghini of the period matches. What it never became is a poster. The Miura and the Countach took that job and the Espada was left as the sensible one, which is a strange description for a low, wide, glass-tailed wedge with a V12 in the nose. That has quietly become the appeal. It is the Lamborghini that people who already own the others buy next, and it does the one thing none of the rest can, which is carry four adults across a continent at speed with the same engine doing the work.

The Espada's reputation for being difficult is really a reputation for being cheap to buy and expensive to fix, and those are different problems. Corrosion is the serious one: floor pans, inner sills, battery tray and lower door skins, all of it structural on a semi-monocoque, and all of it hidden under carpet and trim. These cars have been rusting since they were new. Running gear is mostly durable. The V12 will do serious mileage if it is set up properly, but keeping six Webers in balance and a distributor honest is ongoing work rather than an annual service, and a poorly running one feels like a broken one. Fuel consumption is heroic. Owners talk about it in gallons per hour. The electrics are of their time and place, which means connections, earths and switchgear rather than anything catastrophic. What genuinely stops projects is interior trim, because it is scarce, expensive and specific to the series. A complete Espada is worth pursuing across a continent.