Long before his obsession with mid-engined supercars, Ferruccio Lamborghini made GTs designed to take on and shame Ferrari. Martin Buckley drives 350 and 400 2+2 to decide where Sant’Agata’s supercruisers now fit in its lexicon of greats.
Lamborghini’s rabid four-decade pursuit of mid-engined street theatre has rather left its earlier front-engined products side-lined in history. Yet, in a quieter way, the 350 and 400GTs of 1964-’67 are equally important. Numbering fewer than 400 examples (reputedly sold at a £400 loss each), with these cars Ferruccio Lamborghini realigned buyers’ expectations at the highest level of the GT market.
As a wealthy industrialist, Ferruccio was in the fortunate position of owning most of the world’s most exotic cars and seeing their compromises and rough edges first hand. Ferrari in particular doggedly persevered, on his road cars at least, with an ordinary selection of chassis components: leaf springs, solid rear axles, hefty tubes and bits of angle iron fashioned into a chassis that looked ruggedly semi-commercial. It all worked quite well, but changed little from year-to-year, model-to-model.
His V12 engines were fabulous, as was the bodywork that was fashioned around them, but Ferrari was yet to be convinced of the need for five-speed gearboxes or four camshafts. He maintained a high-handed disregard for customer comfort and reliability and thought even less of their views, even if they happened to be an equally wealthy local industrialist. However, even if Enzo had not famously snubbed Ferruccio by refusing to give an audience at Maranello, this craggy-faced self-made tractor tycoon, with no need to rely on the banks or government for his funding, was probably destined to build his own super sports car.
A kinder and more lighthearted figure than Enzo Ferrari, Lamborghini was no less determined. Although clear that he didn’t want to challenge Ferrari in competition, he did not do things by halves and understood that to build the ultimate car you first had to build the ultimate factory. Sant’Agata Bolognese, 20 miles from Modena, would be a clean-lined eat-off-the-floor monument to the modern art of supercar manufacture with the latest machine tooling and production techniques. To keep control of quality, Ferruccio would bring as much component manufacture in-house as possible.Not only were the traditional solid billet crankshafts machined down from 204 to 53lb (in an operation that took 30 hours) but, eventually, even gearboxes and differentials would be built on-site.
Meanwhile a prototype was being prepared by a team of frustrated racing car designers – mostly in their 20s – in Lamborghini’s tractor factory 10 miles away at Cento. As it turned out, the 1963 350GTV prototype was a clumsy opening shot, hard to take seriously at the time because of its styling. Ex-Bertone head stylist Franco Scag-lione was so hamstrung by Ferruccio’s brief that he found it impossible to come up with anything original looking and cohesive. There were elements of Corvette Stingray and Aston Martin DB4 (both cars owned and loved by Mr Lamborghini) but the end result looked like something Captain Scarlet should be driving. Lamborghini acknowledged the critics and asked Touring of Milan to do a tidied-up production version in aluminium to the firm’s Superleggera principles – a superstructure of small steel tubes – and supplied at the rate of 10-15 per month.
If the stylist was constrained, the designers were given free rein, rather too much in the case of Giotto Bizzarrini whose quad-cam, dry-sump V12 produced 360bhp at a very uncivilised 8000rpm. This wild power was not what Ferruccio wanted for his GT car and when 24-year-old Giampoalo Dallara was put in charge of the project, his first job was to detune this otherwise fantastic engine. Dumping the dry sump compromised the low bonnet line but the simple answer was found in changing the vertical intake Weber 40s for horizontal ones, which were much cheaper (Lamborghini did not want to make his car more expensive than a Ferrari but, if possible, cheaper) and available in larger numbers.
Even with 270bhp the Lamborghini V12 had more power than the contemporary Ferrari and, peaking at 6500rpm, it was more usable. Restyled by Touring, and its chassis beefed-up by Dallara to take wider door frames and better bodywork mountings, this was the sleek, bug-eyed 1050kg two-seater Ferruccio launched in May 1964. The basic shape lasted through to 1967 and the demise of Touring. In fact it went on beyond Touring when former employees, working for the designer Mario Marazzi, continued to make the bodies on Lamborghini-owned tooling.
In the intervening three years there would be several developments. The most significant was the introduction of a 4-litre, 320bhp 2+2 with a longer wheelbase and lowered floor to take the small rear seats. It looked the same but almost every panel was subtly different and, because it was anticipated it would sell in larger numbers, those panels were formed in steel rather than ally. When the 400GT 2+2 was launched in March 1966 it came with Lamborghini’s own five-speed ’box and differential, replacing the ZF units. Confusingly Lamborghini continued to list a 350GT to protect resale values and built a few two-seaters with the 4-litre engine.
Thanks to the Lamborghini factory museum, we were able to sample both 350GT and 400 GT 2+2 on local roads. Apart from the obvious headlamp arrangement differences (single lozenge-shaped Cibiés on the 350, four circular Hellas on the 400) there are myriad detail changes that are only obvious when these early cars are side-by-side. The 350GT has dual fuel fillers (it has two tanks to the 400’s space-liberating single tank) and a single windscreen wiper (the 400 has two) that was developed in conjunction with Ferruccio’s stillborn helicopter project. The spinners on the Borrani wire wheels are non-eared, its roofline is slightly higher and the rear window cuts much more deeply into the roof. At a glance it is hard to detect the different screen rakes of the two cars or the revised boot opening of the 400. Unlike the 400, the front bumper of this 350 has the optional over-riders.
