Car enthusiasts often dream of striking gold with a “barn find” — a valuable classic vehicle discovered under a tarp in some farmer’s outbuilding.
There have been some pretty impressive barn finds, according to Classic & Sports Car: two Mustangs (one stunt car and one “hero” car) featured in the 1968 Steve McQueen crime thriller “Bullitt,” a rare ’69 Dodge Charger Daytona built for NASCAR racing, and a Porsche 901 (“so rare that even the Porsche factory didn’t have one in its collection”).
Now we can add another amazing discovery to the list.
It’s a 1970 Lamborghini Miura P400 S that apparently spent 24 years in its original owner’s living room.
Yes, that’s right: The rare sports car spent nearly a quarter of a century tucked away inside a house in Long Island, New York, according to The Sun.
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That statement raises a lot of questions in the non-car-enthusiast’s mind, not the least of which are, “Who stores a Lamborghini in their living room for 24 years? And why? And how did they get it in there?”
Most of these average man-on-the-street questions went unanswered by the mainstream and automotive journalists, who evidently were caught up in the excitement of such a rare, pristine and extremely valuable find.
And valuable it is. The car is expected to bring up to $2.5 million at auction in August, the Economic Times reported.
It “will be the auction highlight of Gooding & Company’s Pebble Beach Auctions on August 17 and 18,” the report said.
Would you keep the car or auction it?
The vehicle’s styling is what really grabs the hearts of automotive enthusiasts. “Car fans are captivated by the Miura’s allure even before they turn on the engine,” the Times reported.
Robert Ross wrote in the RobbReport that the car is, “inarguably, the most beautiful Lamborghini ever made.”
But it isn’t just good-looking, he hastened to add.
“In 1970, the Road & Track team achieved a top speed of 168 mph in a Miura, faster than any car the magazine had ever tested to that point,” Ross said.
He provided a few insights into the car’s history.
“Sold new in Italy, it was exported to the United States in the early 1980s,” Ross reported.
“By the middle part of that decade, it was placed in static storage — not in the garage, but in the living room of the owner’s modest home in East Rockaway, N.Y. (Who of us in love with an automobile hasn’t imagined doing just that?),” he wrote.
“Remaining there until 2024, it was carefully extracted — requiring the demolition of interior walls — and sold to the current consignor.”
The car originally sold for $20,000 — about $187,815 in today’s dollars, according to The Sun.
It boasted a 3.9-liter transverse V12 engine with 345 horsepower.
Only about 764 such cars were made (including the P400 and its siblings, the P400 S and P400 SV), “and now every one that survives is valued as a historical artifact,” the Times said.
With 26,100 miles on the odometer and admittedly a few dings here and there, the Miura is not quite in showroom condition.
Ross said the vehicle’s prospective buyer “should anticipate that restoring the vehicle could add another $500,000-plus to the privilege of owning a Lamborghini whose history and provenance simply cannot be made up.”
