Simon Kidston, of Bonham and Brooks auction house, peers inside a vintage 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO which won the 1963 Le Mans GT race, in London, 30 October 2000.Adrian Dennis / Getty An Italian court has officially recognized the Ferrari 250 GTO as a work of art, thus protecting the design from companies building replicas or fakes.The Ferrari 250 GTO is regarded as the Holy Grail of classic cars, a claim supported by the people who drive and buy them, and backed up by its status as one of the most expensive cars in the world.The last 250 GTO to hit the auction block, a 1962 model with upgraded Series II bodywork, sold for a staggering US$48,405,000.Its the first time in Italy that a car has been recognized as a work of art, a Ferrari spokesperson told the Daily Telegraph. Its not just its beauty that makes it special it also has a long racing history.Ferrari started a petition to have the design and intellectual property rights of the GTO recognized after a company claimed it was going to start building 250 GTO replicas in Modena, Italy, Ferraris hometown.Only 36 original GTOs were built, and all of them survive today. Under the hood of a Ferrari 250 GTO is a 3.0-litre Colombo V12, which produced somewhere around 300 horsepower; that doesnt sound like a lot, but keep in mind the body only weighed 850 kg. The low weight and high power for the time allowed the GTO to take numerous victories in almost every aspect of European road racing, earning it much praise.Ferrari has always been a stickler for blocking imitators and recreations, famously destroying a Ferrari replica used in Miami Vice in order to give the main character a real Ferrari. More recently, the automaker asked the owner of a Ferrari F40 that had been transformed into an open-top race car to remove all Ferrari badges from the body, because of its
Origin: Ferrari 250 GTO recognized as art by Italian court to block imitators
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Confirmed: this is the just-restored Lamborghini Miura from ‘The Italian Job’
LAMBORGHINI MIURALamborghini Lamborghini has finally found, verified and restored the Miura P400 driven by Rossano Brazzi in the iconic opening scene of the classic 1969 film The Italian Job. The search lasted years, but the Kaiser Collection of Vaduz, in Liechtenstein, finally provided a light at the end of the tunnel, consulting the marque’s classic Polo Storico arm and asking it to examine the collection’s Miura to see if it was the long-lost car, and to assign a chassis number to the screen-used vehicle. Once Lamborghini specialists got their hands on it, they used documents and testimonies from former employees – including Enzo Moruzzi, who originally delivered the vehicle to the film set, and drove it as a stunt double for the actor in the film – to verify that chassis #3586 was indeed the Miura used in the movie. The Miura that Paramount Pictures pushed off the side of the mountain for the scene was an already heavily damaged vehicle the production company bought; to find a non-crashed match, Paramount went straight to Lamborghini. A P400 in exactly the same colour and with the same interior was pulled off the production line for the film. In order to keep the car in perfect shape for the car’s next owner after filming, Moruzzi requested the white seats of the car be changed to black ones. The headrests in a Miura are attached to the dividing glass between the engine and the cockpit, so when Moruzzi asked for the seats to be changed, the headrests remained in the original white—this is actually visible in some shots. On the now-restored car, the seats are in their original white colour. On the 50th anniversary of both the car and the film, the two are brought back together. Let’s just hope they avoid any tunnels on the way to the
Origin: Confirmed: this is the just-restored Lamborghini Miura from ‘The Italian Job’
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