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Japanese custom shop Liberty Walk showcased a classic Lamborghini Miura that looks to have been given the company’s signature treatment—a wheel-hugging wide body—at the 2018 Tokyo Auto Salon.
Liberty Walk is known for its custom widebody conversions, with work encompassing cars as domestic as the Chrysler 300 and Ford Mustang to exotics like the Nissan GT-R, Ferrari 458 Italia, Lexus LC500, and Lamborghini Aventador. Its creations are divisive. Some adore the shop for making already high-performance cars even more extreme, others loathe them for compromising the performance of the cars with bulky, form-over-function bodywork.
Many in the latter camp are grateful that Liberty Walk has kept its paws off of classic cars for the most part, but they might bring out their pitchforks in response to Liberty Walk’s Miura.
Why would some be bothered by this? Well, one could argue that the Miura was among the first supercars ever built, and when it debuted in 1966, it shared the roads with cars such as the pedestrian Fiat 1500. For reference, the Miura came out the same year as The Beatles’ Revolver. It was beyond revolutionary for its time, and since it was limited to 764 examples, its looks never became commonplace anywhere. Nothing before or since has looked as exotic as the first Miura.
Such a rare and beautiful car, of such significance to history, is not the canvas for a showy widebody then, is it? Why butcher a classic car in the name of greed for attention?
Simply put, the car is not one of the 764 original Miuras. YouTube user effspot, who attended Liberty Walk’s venue at the Tokyo Auto Salon, states in their video that this Miura is no more than a replica built upon the frame of a Ford GT40, and clad in a handmade body. The Drive reached out to Liberty Walk for comment on this claim, and the shop confirmed that it was indeed a GT40-based car, built “just for promotion.”
With that established, there is no reason for history hardliners to get upset over the modifications made to this car. Their steel, their car. If it were the real deal, however, it could cross a line for many classic car fans.
