Ferruccio Lamborghini founded his car company (Automobili Ferruccio Lamborghini S.p.A.) in 1963 with the objective of producing a refined grand touring car to compete with offerings from established marques such as Ferrari.

Ferruccio Lamborghini built tractors and he wasn’t happy about the clutch on his Ferrari. As a builder of tractors, Lamborghini knew something about clutches, so he decided to approach Enzo about the problem. But Ferrari, whose distaste for his customers was already legendary, rudely dismissed him.

Lamborghini was not used to being summarily brushed off. After all, he had started out poor and had become a successful, wealthy industrialist, who just coincidentally built a product that also had an engine, clutch and drive-train.

Driven by anger, he decided to modify his own 1958 Ferrari 250GT into the vehicle that he wanted, but felt Ferrari could not or would not build. The modifications worked so well that it gave Lamborghini the idea that he should start building his own high-performance Grand Touring car.

A long time ago, when I was 14, I cycled with a friend to Henley on Thames, about 15 miles from Slough, where I was living at the time. There was a car concessionaires that dealt in Porsche, Ferrari and Lamborghini. The sales staff were friendly, out the back they had a Lamborghini Countach they were fixing for some Arab Sheikh. They let us sit in it, it was so low, it was almost as though we were sitting on the floor.

Countach! An Italian exclamation of astonishment! The hottest supercar of the 1980s. Designed, like the Miura it replaced, by Marcello Gandini. In the eighties posters of the Countach would adorn the walls of any teen petrolhead. Jay Leno used one as an everyday vehicle in the eighties. It produced a whopping 455 hp, the first American production car to top 400hp was the Dodge Viper introduced in 1992.

Not surprisingly many diecast companies have produced the iconic design in miniature. The first Lamborghini supercar was the Lamborghini Miura a car, it a legendary car, it showed Lamborghini truly had arrived to the supercar table. They could compete with the likes of Ferrari and Porsche. There is a tremendous frisson of nostalgia for me with this model. I remember having the Matchbox model as a child and I also remember watching the Italian Job, which has a Lamborghini Miura crash in the classic opening scene. I now have a dozen miniature Miuras.

I have never seen a real Miura, let alone sat in one. Another Lamborghini with that frisson of nostalgia is the Lamborghini Marzal, this was one of the first Matchbox cars with Superfast wheels. Many Matchbox castings in 1969 were adapted from regular wheels to the new Superfast wheels, but the Lamborghini Marzal was introduced with Superfast Wheels from the beginning and it was the car in the artwork of the first Superfast track set.

The Lamborghini Marzal was a prototype concept car presented by Lamborghini at the 1967 Geneva Motor Show. The Marzal remained a one-off, though the general shape and many of the ideas would go on to be used in the Espada. The Marzal design probably found wider recognition as a die-cast model, with both Dinky and Matchbox making scale models.

This model got a new lease of life as part of the Matchbox Super GT budget range in the 1980s where the cars have the interior left out, black glass and any opening details removed, the Marzal Super GT also lost it’s lower door windows.

As my collection gets larger, maybe too large, I sometimes think about cutting back and maybe concentrating just on a few themes, one of which would be Lamborghini, I have around 50 Lamborghini models, only Ford (117), Chevrolet (99) and Porsche (69) are more numerous in my collection. The photo below shows 45 of my models, those I was able to find easily without going meticulously through every shelf, box and drawer holding my collection.

I am still on the lookout for other Lamborghinis to add to my collection, I would particularly like to find a Siku Lamborghini Espada, I also find it hard to resist any Miura.