Perhaps the story is true, and Ferruccio Lamborghini needed a clutch job on his brand new Ferrari, so he complained about it to il Commendatore Enzo who insulted the tractor manufacturer, scoffing at him to go back to agricultural machines and leave the sportscars to the Prancing Horse factory. Or perhaps Signore Lamborghini had always wanted to build his own sportscar. Either way, his maiden effort — the 350 GTV — certainly got him noticed by the world as much as by his stern neighbour Enzo.
And so one of the greatest rivalries in automotive folklore was born (it’s ironic that Sant’Agata and Maranello, usually die-hard competitors, cooperate dutifully when it comes to borrowing cars for evaluation purposes, “with just a simple phone call” as a Ferrari spokesman once told wheels, yet the pair refuse to lend cars to foreign carmakers out of honour to Italy — or something).
In order to steal some of Ferrari’s hogged limelight, Lamborghini did everything right. He commissioned the best people to be involved, and the 1963 Turin motor show set the scene for plenty of dropped jaws once the drapes came off the 350 GTV. Franco Scaglione, the designer responsible for the incredible Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale, the Porsche 356 Abarth Carrera, and a whole host of Bertone designs, including Alfa’s outrageous BAT cars, did the styling.
A couple of famous Modenese, Giorgio Neri and Luciano Bonacini, sorted out the tube frame chassis, and legendary engineer Giotto Bizzarrini designed a dry-sumped, 3.5-litre V12 engine, developing nearly 350bhp or up to 400bhp in race tune at an unheard of 11,000rpm. Incase anyone missed seeing the 350 GTV, they’d have heard it wailing away.
Unfortunately, you can’t buy the 350 GTV, no matter how many dirhams you dump in front of the Lamborghini museum, where it now rightfully rests. But you can buy the next best thing, the 350 GT. While the GTV was simply a promotional show piece, the GT was its development for the road, getting there just a year after that Turin debut that left people floored.
The GTV prototype was quite comprehensively redesigned for street use, dropping the dry-sump lubrication system, going with milder camshafts, reducing compression, using more common carburettors, and settling on a beautiful Carozzeria Touring body. If you’re seriously looking at one of these, you could be in luck when it comes to that hand-crafted body, as they were mostly made from rust-proof aluminium, although some steel bodies slipped through the seams, so that’s a huge point to look out for, potentially slicing the price in half.
More than 130 were built, so they’re not impossible to find, especially if you consider that about 30 Ferrari 250 GTOs rolled out of neighbouring Maranello at the time, while a more directly comparable 275 GTB was produced in almost a thousand examples — but they cost double the price of a 350 GT, which you can pick up for around $200,000 (Dh735,000) in great nick. Better than a $200,000 tractor, that’s for sure.
