Jalopnik and Stick Shift are certainly no aliens to each other. Earlier this year, our Messrs. Wert and Siler gave a helping hand to Stick Shift’s Brett Berk in driving the bollocks Bentley Continental GT Speed, all twelve cylinders and six hundred horsepower of it.

To keep our cylinder counts steady, Brett, Hyperleggera’s Natalie Polgar and I drove out to Long Island on a recent August day to see a Lamborghini Miura in its full glory. William Branston of Champion Motor Sports was kind enough to let us all climb inside and imagine a life of 60s Italian playboyship.

Sticking true to its print roots, VF could only publish a handful of the photographs Natalie and I took of the Miura. But here at Jalopnik, we’ve got internets aplenty, so lean back and enjoy all twenty shots that made the cut, plus the narrative accompanying each shot.

If you’re interested in what it feels like to sit inside a Miura—or how one ends up with a classmate who drives a Countach to his senior prom—click through to Vanity Fair. But only after you’re done with the photos.

The Miura could be a prime candidate for a star role in the Italian remake of Transformers.

Rear quarter panels. Oh my, oh my.

Looking down the transversely mounted V12.

The P400 was the first Miura, the one with the eyelashes, the tendency to catch fire at idle and to become airborne in top gear.

This is the vicinity of the left front wheel. You can see the Fiamm horn and the chassis elements, drilled for lightness.

A view through a cooling vent in the trunklid—which, of course, is in the front.

The supremely competent Will Branston, director of Champion Motor Sports’s Collectible & Investment Car Division, is standing in front of a late model Diablo.

Cam cover with the famous twin choke Weber carburators.

Oil reservoir.

If you have a tattoo of this, please post in the comments.

About six inches behind the head of the driver and the passenger is the engine. That single pane of Perspex is tasked with quite a lot of sound and heat deadening.

If you’re 5'7" like Natalie, a Miura’s cockpit is the coziest place in the world.

Please dress up for your Miura. Thank you.

Yes, the speedo really is maxed out at 200 MPH. The Miura would do around 175.

The patina on this car was particularly beautiful. Concourse quality can be alienating: this Miura could probably be driven off the lot without guilt.

Vintage and very cool seatbelt arrangement. It’s a big metal hook you latch into a receptacle.

The eyelashes serve as brake cooling ducts. They would be gone in later editions of the Miura.

A curious tailpipe solution, most often seen on diesels with no particulate filters.

Perhaps the best angle to the Miura. You simply cannot spend too much time studying its lines and surfaces.

One day, we will be back to listen to it idle…to ride in it…to drive it. One step at a time.

All photos by Natalie Polgar and Peter Orosz.

The 47-year-old Lamborghini owner reports he heard strange noises on a drive home near Riechenburg, Germany. Truck drivers came to his aid when the car erupted in flames, but not before it did serious damage to a rare piece of wonderful Italian automobilia. Save the Miuras? Maybe we should stop handing over exotics to people who can afford to repair them. Give someone who makes minimum wage a Miura and we promise you they throw their body on the car at the first sight of flames. (H/T to Philllip!)

[20 Minuted Online, Google Translated]

József Erdősi was an exchange student at the University of Bologna, following in the footsteps of Dante Alighieri and Nicolaus Copernicus. Unlike the millennium-old university’s famous earlier alumni, he was not studying to be a poet or an astronomer: József’s future lay in agricultural engineering. He spent some of his practice time at Lamborghini Trattori, the tractormaking giant founded in post-war Italy by the man who would go on to give Enzo Ferrari bad dreams.

Through the right connections with the right people, József was allowed to transfer for a few weeks to Lamborghini’s other factory—Automobili Lamborghini—in the village of Sant’Agata Bolognese, a hamlet in Emilia-Romagna province between Bologna and Modena. It was here that Ferruccio Lamborghini had founded his sports car manufacture in 1963 to take on Ferrari in neighboring Maranello.

As an engineering student, József spent his days in the brake and engine assembly areas. He was also granted access to the room where Miuras received their scheduled maintenance.

It was not all work and no play for Mr. Erdősi. One day, an enigmatic question came his way about his cardiovascular health. Upon replying in the positive, he found out what it was all about. The young future engineer was about to receive a ride in the fastest road car of its day: a Lamborghini Miura.

“The seat was extremely low. I buckled up with a four-point racing harness. Then, as we rolled out of the factory, the test driver floored it. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. He switched to second gear at 90 MPH, third gear at 125 MPH, fourth at 140 MPH and went all the way to fifth gear at an astonishing 160 MPH,” he recalled in a recent conversation. “A field then approached at great speed. I was bracing myself for the inevitable ride through rows of corn when the driver flicked the wheel and took a corner at an unlikely speed. This went on for another forty minutes.”

By József’s recollections, the test driver he rode with that day had been the racing mechanic for Lorenzo Bandini—Ferrari’s Formula One and sports car driver—until Bandini’s fiery demise at the 1967 Monaco Grand Prix.

An avid photographer, József took a number of pictures on black and white Ilford film. His photos offer a unique glimpse into a nascent Lamborghini factory in its 60s heydays. Four years later, Ferruccio Lamborghini would be gone as the factory’s owner and car manufacturers everywhere would be face to face with the incompatibility of monster V12’s with the 1973 oil crisis.

Lamborghini would survive this all in the coming decades until it came to rest as a subsidiary of a German giant, producing fabulous modern cars in a brand-new Audi-built factory on the same spot.

The Miura production line in all its high-tech 1969 glory.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

Parallel to the Miura was built the four-seater Espada, both Marcello Gandini designs using the same 4-liter Giotto Bizzarrini V12 engine.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

Another shot of the Espada line shows a distinct Espada feature: the huge pane of glass on the rear hatch.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

This is a Miura S in for regular checkup. It had been shipped to Italy from California.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

A Miura being serviced, with the engine cover taken clear off.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

A finished Espada with old-school Italian license plates. In the background, you can see the open door of a Miura, which, when viewed from front, resembles a bull’s horn.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

A Lamborghini V12 engine on the test bench, with twelve polished velocity trumpets capping its Webers.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

Another shot of the V12 in the test chamber.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

This is a complete engine-transmission assembly. You can see from its longitudinal setup that it’s meant for the Espada: in the Miura, the same engine is mounted transversely behind the cabin.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

A Miura stripped down to the bare chassis as it is being serviced. For the sake of everyday usability, the velocity trumpets are replaced with common air boxes.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

Iran is, of course, all over the news these days after last week’s presidental election turned into a nationwide protest, with supporters of defeated opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi claiming that the election was rigged in favor of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If you’ve missed out on the news, catch up with pictures of the demonstrations or read Robert Fisk’s report from the streets of Tehran, in defiance of the regime’s crackdown on foreign journalists.

While cars in Iran these days are mostly used as fuel to burn, it’s a big country with lots of cheap gas and a wealth of domestically produced cars. Presented here are a selection of photos and stories about cars which are either built in Iran or have connections to Iran.

Laleh Seddigh

Meet Laleh Seddigh, Iran’s most famous racing driver. It’s tough to be a female athlete in Iran with its strict Islamic dress code, but motor racing offers a quick escape: both men and women are generally covered from head to toe.

She is quick and has earned the respect of men, not an easy thing to do in motor racing anywhere. In an interview with Seddigh in The Observer, a fellow racing driver had this to say: “When she sits behind the wheel she sheds her feminine shell and turns into a man.”

Rest assured: when she is not racing against men, her feminine shell is very much intact.

Photo Credit: HENGHAMEH FAHIMI/AFP/Getty Images

Iran Khodro Paykan

This is the Paykan, Iran’s ubiquitous homemade car. Based on the 1967 Hillman Hunter, 2.3 million of them were made over four decades as the car incorporated new technology but few styling changes. Manufacturer Iran Khodro, the country’s largest domestic carmaker, has ceased production in 2005, sold off the production line to the Sudanese and introduced its replacement: the Samand.

Photo Credit: Fabien Dany/Flickr

Iran Khodro Samand

Debuting in 2005 and building on the long-standing relationship between Iran and France, the Samand is made on the platform of the Peugeot 405, a midsize sedan which was European Car of the Year in 1988.

Although it’s named after a breed of fast horse, the Samand is no Secretariat: power from its 1.8-liter inline four tops out at 97 HP.

Photo Credit: hapal/Flickr

Maserati 5000GT

Preceding the Samand by half a century, the Maserati 5000GT has power aplenty. Commissioned by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the CIA-backed monarch of Iran toppled in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the 5000GT was an absolute monster.

Its five-liter V8 was derived from a racing unit and produced a healthy 340 HP. The first two cars went to Pahlavi, while Maserati made another 32 examples in the following 6 years. Enrico’s Maserati Pages has a wealth of pictures and data.

Photo Credit: Enrico’s Maserati Pages

1971 Lamborghini Miura SV

He may have been a despot who squandered away his country’s oil wealth, but at least Pahlavi spent it with good taste. His midnight blue Lamborghini Miura SV is perhaps the most gorgeous Lambo ever. The shah purchased it in 1971 and used it extensively until he was deposed in 1979. The car remained in Iran until 1991, when it was smuggled to Italy, then made it into the caring hands of Joe Sackey, who has had it restored to absolute perfection. Lamborghini Registry has the details.

Photo Credit: Lamborghini Registry

Riots in Tehran on June 15, 2009

This is what cars are used for in Tehran these days. The car is most likely a Paykan and these guys are supporters of opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. They are protesting against the killing of their fellow demonstrators by Iranian security forces.

Photo Credit: -/AFP/Getty Images

Pin-up Paykan

This young man in Tehran proves that Paykans can be put to much better use than impromptu bonfires. Political Islam may be against the public display of women, but what goes on inside one’s vehicle is nobody else’s business.

On the other hand, pin-up girls have a way of transcending both nations and religions.

Photo Credit: kamshots/Flickr

Saipa Miniator, Meet the Democrator

Here’s the man the demonstrators would like to see out of office: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He is pictured here in at the inauguration ceremony of car company Saipa’s new production line in December 2008. Saipa is Iran’s second-largest carmaker and it has always manufactured handed-down French designs. Until now.

The car Ahmadinejad is riding in is all-Iranian and has the greatest name since the Corvette Sting Ray: it’s called the Saipa Miniator.

Photo Credit: ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

Iranian Peugeot Factory

The Miniator does not mean the end of Iranian production of French cars: when these guys are not taking a break, they make Peugeot 206’s in a Tehran factory.

Photo Credit: BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images

Renault Tondar

Eastern Europeans will immediately recognize the homely rump of this car: it’s a Dacia Logan, manufactured by Renault’s Romanian subsidy. It is also made in Iran, where it’s sold as a Renault Tondar—that’s Persian for thunder.

Photo Credit: ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

An SLK In Tehran

Bridging the gap between the deposed shah’s Italian exotica and the Paykans are European imports like this Mercedes-Benz SLK, burdened in Iran with heavy import tariffs. The owner of this Benz will have no problem filling it up with cheap Iranian gas, but he has paid an average Iranian’s lifetime wages for the privilege of driving a white German droptop in Tehran.

Photo Credit: ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

Women-Only Taxi Driver

Let’s round up things with another Iranian lady. Sodabeh Kiyali is a taxi driver employed by a women-only taxi agency in Tehran. Buses are segregated in Iran, with women traveling in the back, but taxis are not: Nesvan Taxi is an option for women who don’t want to squeeze into a back seat with other men.

Photo Credit: ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

For serious road racing, you need a car with the engine in the middle: behind the driver but in front of the rear axle. While pretty in its physics on paper, the idea of mid-engined car construction was a difficult birth. In spite of its conception and very successful application by Ferdinand Porsche in the pre-war Benz Tropfenwagen (pictured left) and various Auto Unions, motor racing emerged from World War Two with front-engined cars.

But then physics came marching down on a racing establishment uncomfortable with the idea of horse-pushed carriages. 1958 would be the last season in Formula One won by a front-engined car, followed by Le Mans in 1962 and the Indianapolis 500 in 1964. Since these respective years, all of these races and championships have been won by mid-engined racing cars. Road cars soon followed, with the tiny fiberglass De Tomaso Vallelunga in 1964, then a year later the very car that gave birth to the word supercar: the Lamborghini Miura, with its transversely mid-mounted V12.

In Formula One and at the Indianapolis 500, it was pesky outsiders who convinced the ruling elite with their performances that mid-engined was the way to go. At Le Mans, a most unlikely development occured: reigning Ferrari replaced its front-engined 1962 330 TRI/LM Spyder (a derivative of a five-year-old design) with the radically new 250 P (pictured above at the Nürburgring) for 1963. The scuderia promptly won both at Sebring and at Le Mans.

It was all doom and gloom for the front engine as the Ferraris were followed by the Ford GT40 and decades of Porsches, beginning with the monstrous 917. But then in 1997, an American decided to give the mid-engine the finger. His name was Dr. Donald Panoz and he liked his six-liter V8’s up front, thank you very much.

The Panoz Esperante GTR-1 was a closed coupé with a Roush V8, named after the Panoz Esperante roadster with which it had little in common. In a sense, it was also mid-engined—but unlike every other mid-engined car, it had its engine between the front axle and the driver.

The GTR-1 had its share of teething problems in its debut year, but it returned for 1998 to take seventh place at Le Mans. One of the drivers was David Brabham, the son of triple Formula One world champion Jack "Black Jack” Brabham, who would go on to win last weekend’s race with Peugeot.

At the end of the 1998 racing season, the GT category that the GTR-1 raced in was eliminated. Panoz countered with a brand-new prototype for the next season: the open-top LMP-1. The car retained the GTR-1’s Batmobile proportions and its six-liter thunder-happy V8, presenting an even more Cyrano-esque nose.

The LMP-1 raced at the 1999 24 Hours of Le Mans, a race made famous by the flying CLR’s of Mercedes-Benz. Driven by Brabham and company, the car finished seventh, similar to its closed-top sibling at the previous year’s race. The LMP-1 would produce its best result in 2000 with a fifth overall finish—which it would repeat in 2003 behind the all-conquering Audis and Audi-derived Bentleys.

By then, the LMP-1 was an aging design, and it was replaced with the LMP07, which would prove disappointing. Panoz withdrew from prototype racing and returned to Le Mans in the GT2 class for 2005, to compete against Ferraris, Porsches and Spykers derived from road cars. Their first outing at the scorching 2005 race would produce no results, but a front-engined Panoz Esperante GT-LM driven by three Brits would beat both Ferrari and Porsche to win GT2 in 2006.

While Panoz’s front-mid-engined prototypes could never really hold up against mid-engined racing cars from major manufacturers, they proved that the front-mid engine construction was a viable concept. In the years that followed, a crop of supercars built on the same principle would emerge: the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren and the Ferrari 599 GTB. The latter is now also available as a track-only version, for decades inconceivable in a front-engined Ferrari, showing perhaps that we have indeed come full circle since Enzo Ferrari first commissioned a mid-engined prototype for Le Mans in 1963.

All we need now is a team with the funding and the guts to follow through.

Photo Credit: Matt Turner/ALLSPORT, Speedhunters, Lokis_world/Flickr, Mike Hewitt /Allsport, Ferrari, Ker Robertson /Allsport

For someone untrained in the language of vehicular design, it’s not easy to describe what makes a car particularly Pininfarina or Bertone—but suffice to say that once you’ve seen examples of both, you will be able to tell them apart at the blink of an eye. An easy metaphor would make Pininfarina the designer of jet planes with Bertone in the business of sci-fi spaceships.

Think Bertone and you think Marcello Gandini, the man whose forehead the Lamborghini Miura sprang from like Pallas at the incredible age of 27. Gandini joined Bertone in 1965 and—following the Miura and the wonderful Espada—he went on to design cars which crave, simply crave ion drives and proton cannons, first amongst them the Lamborghini Countach.

The news last fall that Pininfarina’s Jason Castriota was to leave his employer of many years to follow in Gandini’s footsteps at Stile Bertone was quite a shocker. Pininfarinas and Bertones just don’t mix. Add to this that the cars Castriota had worked on at Pininfarina—the Maseratis Birdcage 75th and GranTurismo, the Ferraris 599 GTB and P4/5—are very Pininfarina, their aggression expressed not by sharp angles but flowing lines that hit you like an aikido throw.

Yet six months later, Castriota unveiled the Mantide, a car Bertone to its core. And while it has not become easier in the past three paragraphs for someone untrained in the language of product design to describe what that precisely is, there is one design element very easy to pinpoint: the angular rear wheelarches.

Like most things Bertone, this is from Gandini. As far as I know, he first used it on the Lamborghini Countach LP500, the prototype which served as the basis for the first production Countach, the LP400. Over subsequent iterations, the Countach lost the angularity, but the motif cropped up in later Gandini designs like the Maserati Shamal—and this Quattroporte IV that was parked the other day on the very street I live on:

By Gandini’s outrageous standards, this car is a subdued Q-ship, especially in the neutral Germanic silver this example—one of only 1,138—was painted in. The Quattroporte IV was produced at the tail end of Maserati’s doldrums, before the company was acquired by Ferrari, and this is their last car that was built in the old Maserati factory, before the Ferrari people threw out all the old machinery. There was a lull of four Quattroporte-less years at the reborn Maserati until they began building the Pininfarina-designed Quattroporte V—the latest version of which we recently drove in Italy.

It’s comforting to see how quickly Castriota has grokked the essentials of Bertone design, as evidenced by this reference to Gandini’s last car for Bertone. I can’t wait to see how he will manage over the years to balance on the shoulders of the giants he’s standing on—and what he’ll add to the Bertone canon. Based on his work at Pininfarina, one is compelled to think he will do just fine.

Photo Credit: Lamborghini, Cartype, 25ora.ro, Stile Bertone and the author

A few hours after we published our in-depth interview with Stile Bertone’s new design director Jason Castriota, I was standing by Lake Como with him showing me the secrets of his first Bertone design, the Mantide.

The front fenders melt into wings behind the front wheels then draw up into a single taut bunch—reminiscent of a calf muscle—which in turn passes under an archway similar to Castriota’s famous C-pillar for the Ferrari 599 GTB. The confluence of curves and LED’s in the back is, when viewed from a step back, a classic Kamm tail. While retaining the tried-and-true shape of the fastback, the Mantide is boldly futuristic.

But will anyone be able to drive it? There are plans to make two more examples, Castriota says, in white and green, to create an Italian flag with the addition of the first car. Then, in an email to the New York Times, he said: “We would not rule out producing as many as 10.” A price has also been quoted: €1,500,000

That's close to two million US dollars at the current exchange rate—almost two Veyrons worth of cold, hard cash. Not insignificant for a car built on a Corvette ZR1, which retails for 5% of the Mantide’s asking price. Let’s examine what you get for that kind of money, apart from the warm feeling of contributing to a company’s survival which has given us the Miura, the Countach and the Lancia Stratos.

Interior

While Jeremy Clarkson has named the Corvette ZR1 his car of the year for 2008 and our own road test editor Wes Siler called it “the best car ever made,” the fact remains: on the inside, it's all Corvette.

To whit, from our first drive:

In fact, the only thing detracting from the ZR1’s grand touring credentials is the interior. The only options on the $103,300 car are an awful set of chrome wheels and the 3ZR upgraded interior package, which succeeds in moving the interior from cheap and nasty into luxurious bass boat territory with more embroidered ZR1 and Corvette logos than my fragile mind could comprehend. We have a hard time accepting the “value” excuse; for this kind of money we’d no longer like to feel like a Jeff Foxworthy punchline. An automatic transmission is, thankfully, not an option.

Let’s see what the Mantide has to offer:

As you can see, it’s a modern European alcantara-carbon-fiber-leather affair, with the car’s hexagonal theme continuing as cutouts on the racing seats, themselves thin carbon shells. The instrument screen is the one used in the Ferrari FXX, the gearshift is a nice aluminum knob and it’s certainly got a snug racer feel to it. But it’s perhaps not as remarkable as the car’s exterior.

Certainly a major upgrade on the Corvette, though, but then that’s not saying much when you’re considering this is a two million dollar Italian super car.

Exterior

Here in Europe, the current Corvette is not liked much. It’s a big, brash American design, a brute amongst small European cars, but while it’s unarguably alien to these shores, I rather fancy its low, wide, flowing looks. In ZR1 trim, it’s a proper menace, with all the right vents, wings and scoops.

The Mantide gets rid of that all. Aside from the front-engined layout and the fastback silhouette, you would be hard pressed to tell there’s a Corvette underneath. And there is: the Mantide is not like the Italian-American cars from the 60s like the Iso Grifo or the De Tomaso Mangusta which paired an Italian chassis with an American V8. Beneath the red carbon fiber is a Corvette ZR1: LS9 engine, aluminum chassis, the works.

But what carbon fiber! It’s all sharp Bertone creases which turn into subtle arcs as you examine them up close, dihedral Enzo doors, smatterings of hexagons everywhere. The angular rear wheelarches—straight off the M577A armoured personnel carrier which transported the space marines into the doomed reactor core in Aliens—frame black Transformer wheels.

It’s dramatically new, so shockingly new that it’s actively disconcerting to take a few steps back and see its classic berlinetta profile. In person, it creates the sort of time warp the iPhone did when it first went on sale in the summer of 2007. You felt as though you were holding a sliver of 2011 in your hands.

The Mantide? I’d say it’s from 2017. Similar vehicles are on their way to leave the inner Solar System.

But then is it worth the price of 20 ZR1’s? There is, of course, no rational answer to such a question, as even the ZR1 is not an entirely rational purchase, being, as Dan Neil put it in his article The rapture of the hypercar, a big needle to deliver the combustible heroin of petroleum.

If you have space-faring ambitions on the public road, set to the soundtrack of a pushrod V8 with titanium bits, then by all means get in touch with Stile Bertone and put down whatever deposit they ask. The car geeks of the world need you to enable them to carry on the traditions of coachbuilding.

And then I saved the best part for the end. If you open the gigantic hood and peer inside, what you’ll see is exactly what you'll see when you open the hood of the ZR1 — a grinning, black Corvette Racing skull named Jake.

So even though this is not a race car, your Le Mans ass-kicking heritage is right there. And who could ask for more.

Photo Credit: Alex Conley (Corvette ZR1), Natalie Polgar and the author (Stile Bertone Mantide)

With over 60 very interesting and very pretty cars on display, the Concorso is a photographic Battle of Ypres. There is no way to capture everything and by the time the cars are packed away for the night, everyone is reeling with exhaustion.

Going over the hundreds upon hundreds of photos we shot over this very long day, here’s the three dozen we like the most. We hope you’ll enjoy.

Photo Credit: Natalie Polgar and Peter Orosz

Eight hundred miles in the dark, four hundred milligrams of caffeine consumed from cans and ceramic cups and there it is: Lake Como. The road approaches from the top of the steep hills which flank its five cubic miles of frigid slate-gray water. We descend toward the city of Como then on to Cernobbio, home of the Villa d’Este, a magnificent lakeside hotel built half a millennium ago and for a day every late April, home to a handful of the world’s most beautiful cars ever built.

I can feel the small white rocks through the thin Kevlar soles of my sneakers. If you focus your eyes to ground level, a honeycomb pattern emerges, cast by the grille of a red coupé. On this very spot two years ago stood another red coupé, designed by the same man, who is now showing me secret archways of aerodynamics. The car is, of course, Jason Castriota’s Stile Bertone Mantide and this is the Concorso d’Eleganza, a show to fry every brain even vaguely interested in cars.

Classic cars, you say? Then what is Castriota’s new concept, unveiled a week ago, doing here? The Concorso was first held in 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, as a beauty contest—for the most beautiful new cars. It certainly is the perfect geological backdrop for automotive beauty, a stone’s throw from the villa where Anakin Skywalker wed Padmé Amidala, and this will be the very last Darth Vader reference in this blogpost. The Concorso soldiered on through the Depression until World War Two, then was briefly relaunched only to die a quick death and remain in a coma until BMW resurrected it ten years ago. It is now the premium event on the European concourse circuit.

There is a tendency among petrolheads to arrive at the cars of the 50s and the 60s as the most perfect embodiment of the automotive form. It certainly is easy to see why. Prior to World War Two, the car was a luxury good, clearly evidenced by the prewar cars which make up three classes of the Concorso. These are mostly huge, baroque battleships and visually, they have more to do with horse-driven carriages than with the vehicles we think of as cars. It is very pleasing to look at, say, a 1936 Auburn, but it would be more at home on the waters of Lake Como as a hydrofoil boat than on the public road.

Something happened during the production lull which was World War Two. The cars that emerged in the 50s were smaller, more human in scale, and much closer mechanically to modern cars. To look at a Ferrari 250 GT is to look at a fairly modern sports coupé.

There is a particular 250 GT on display, a Lusso, the last model in Ferrari’s labyrinthine first production model, and this car is chestnut brown and was owned by Steve McQueen. It is deeply beautiful and next to it stand a 250 GT SWB, a Lamborghini Miura, Paul Frère’s old Maserati, and so on. Most of these cars were closely related to motor racing, a pioneering and highly dangerous— therefore very cool—activity back then. They also happen to be really pretty.

But their prettyness stems not from the fact that they are old, au contraire, they are pretty because they were radically new for their day. The Miura was one of the first road cars to have its engine midships. The Ferrari 250 GT SWB was perhaps the best road racing car of its day. The Jaguar D-Type had disc brakes.

These were cars made by people who believed in progress.

This is why it’s wrong to treat them as anything other than fine museum pieces and why it’s so refreshing to see new concepts make up a separate class at the Concorso. Concepts which may be very abstract exercises in design, never making it into production, but concepts which may introduce new ideas. Like the many trick wings on the Bertone Mantide.

What is the point of it all? It’s hard to tell. There are people here who collect cars the way they collect wristwatches and vacation homes and then there are car geeks with mischievous twinkles in their eyes, people like you and I who happen to be wealthy enough to own an interesting old car and it is their cars which bear evidence to daily driving.

But make no mistake: this is a beauty contest. A day of fine escapism, and while there are new cars on display, the answer to the future of the automobile will not emerge from here. However space age the looks, the Corvette ZR1-based Mantide will not be an answer to a world running out of space and oil and filling with people who have never owned a car but would certainly like to do so.

Perhaps the best way to approach it is as a game. Dress up in a fine spring suit, grab a glass of champagne, and enjoy the Alpine sun as you walk around the mammoth sycamore by the hotel and lean in close to the leather straps which hold engine covers above triple Webers. Tomorrow will be another day. But if you lean in close enough, you can just about hear a racing V12 scream down the Mulsanne straight at Le Mans.

Just make sure you step back when the car’s owner guns the engine for real. These things are LOUD.

Next up, we’ll look at the more interesting cars of the Concorso in detail. Like this 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B pictured above, which won this year’s Coppa d’Oro: the grand prize of the event.

Photo Credit: Natalie Polgar and the author

The reality is it’s got great music, a lovely analog look, prodigious shots of a Lamborghini Miura SV, a guy who changes from a tux into a racing suit and sings in a mumbling baritone while driving—and all this is interspersed with Group B rally footage. Including heavy crashes. And Formula 1 crashes too!

WTF, right? But WTF in a most excellent way.

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