Most “1970 Lamborghini” write-ups lump the Urraco in with the rest of that year’s lineup, because it’s a good story and the car looks the part. It’s also wrong. The Urraco sat on a stand in Turin in November 1970 as a pre-production show car; nobody drove one home until 1972. If you’re trying to understand what Lamborghini actually built and sold in 1970, the real answer is three cars: the Miura S, the Espada Series II, and the newly launched Jarama GT 400.
That distinction matters if you’re researching values, provenance, or just trying to get the history straight. Here’s the lineup as it actually existed.
Table of Contents
- What Lamborghini Was Selling in 1970
- Miura S: The Halo Car Gets Sharper Teeth
- Espada Series II: The Grand Tourer Grows Up
- Jarama GT 400: The Overlooked Front-Engine Lambo
- The Urraco: Shown in 1970, Sold in 1972
- 1970 Lamborghini Lineup: Specs Compared
- Buying and Collecting Notes
- The Takeaway
What Lamborghini Was Selling in 1970
Lamborghini in 1970 was a company with exactly one factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese and three cars on the price list, each aimed at a different kind of buyer. The Miura S was the two-seat exotic, the one that made the brand’s name and scared Ferrari into rethinking its own mid-engine plans. The Espada Series II was the four-seat grand tourer, quietly the best-selling model Lamborghini had ever built. The Jarama GT 400, new that March, was a smaller front-engine 2+2 aimed at buyers who wanted V12 performance without the Espada’s footprint.
That’s it. No V8, no baby Lambo, no entry point. The Urraco existed only as a design study wearing a “coming soon” sign.
Miura S: The Halo Car Gets Sharper Teeth
By 1970, the Miura was already three years into production and had earned its reputation the hard way — as the car every other manufacturer’s engineers quietly measured themselves against. The S variant, introduced in late 1968, pushed the transverse-mounted 3.9-liter V12 to 370 horsepower at 7,700 rpm, up from the original P400’s 350, through higher-lift cams and larger carburetors on fatter intake manifolds. Lamborghini also thickened the chassis steel starting partway through the S run, from 0.9mm to a full millimeter, after early cars showed a tendency to flex under hard cornering at speed.
The result was a car that would run to roughly 170 mph and get to 60 mph in well under seven seconds — numbers that held up against anything else on the road in 1970, supercar or otherwise. What set the S apart from a spec sheet, though, was cabin refinement buyers actually noticed: electric windows, a small center console air vent, and chrome trim around the headlights and side windows that the base P400 never had. It wasn’t a soft car. It was a fast car that had stopped apologizing for its interior.
Espada Series II: The Grand Tourer Grows Up
The Espada doesn’t get the poster-on-the-wall treatment the Miura does, but it was the car keeping Lamborghini’s lights on. The Series II, revealed in 1970, bumped the 3.9-liter quad-cam V12 to 350 horsepower at 7,500 rpm and gave the cabin a real overhaul: a new wood-trimmed dashboard, a redesigned center console, and better rear-seat ventilation for the passengers actually expected to use the back seat, since this was a genuine four-seater rather than a Miura with delusions of practicality.
Bertone’s Marcello Gandini penned a shape that still looks unlike anything else from the era — a low, wedge-flavored fastback with a roofline sitting barely 112 centimeters off the ground, closer to a coupe’s proportions than any four-seat GT had a right to claim. Lamborghini built 575 Series II Espadas between 1970 and 1972, making it the highest-volume version of the model across its entire run. If you wanted a car that could do 150 mph on the autostrada with your family in it, this was the only serious option with a raging bull on the nose.
Jarama GT 400: The Overlooked Front-Engine Lambo
The Jarama debuted at the Geneva show in March 1970 as the replacement for the Islero, and it’s the model that gets skipped over most often in casual retrospectives — which is a shame, because it was the last front-engine V12 GT Lamborghini would ever build. Paolo Stanzani shortened the Espada’s platform by 27 centimeters to keep tooling costs down, which gave the Jarama a wider track than the Islero it replaced and a stance that looked stockier and more aggressive than either car it was built between.
Power came from the same 3,929cc quad-cam V12 family, fed by six twin-throat Weber carburetors and rated at 350 horsepower with 289 lb-ft of torque, routed through a five-speed manual to the rear wheels. Lamborghini quoted 0-60 mph in 7.2 seconds and a standing quarter-mile around 15.6 seconds — quick for a front-engine 2+2 in 1970, if a step behind the mid-engine Miura. Bertone built the panels, with final assembly handled by Carrozzeria Marazzi rather than Bertone’s own line, which is part of why surviving cars show more build-quality variation than Espadas from the same years. Only 177 examples of the original 400 GT were built before the revised GTS took over in 1973, which makes it the rarest of the three cars Lamborghini actually sold in 1970.
The Urraco: Shown in 1970, Sold in 1972
This is the part most “1970 Lamborghini” lists get wrong. In November 1970, Lamborghini and Bertone put a pre-production Urraco on display at the Turin Motor Show — Gandini’s design for a smaller, more attainable Lamborghini built around the company’s first V8. It was real, it was on a stand, and it generated exactly the kind of press Lamborghini wanted.
It was not for sale. Development dragged for two more years while Lamborghini sorted out the 2.5-liter V8 and a production line that could actually build the thing at a price competitive with Porsche and Ferrari’s smaller offerings. The Urraco P250 didn’t reach customers until 1972, and total production across every variant through 1979 landed at 791 units. For a broader picture of the Lamborghini lineup as the decade wound down, see the complete 1979 model year — modest numbers overall for what was meant to be Lamborghini’s volume play. If a listing, article, or seller describes a “1970 Urraco” as a production car, that’s a red flag worth asking about directly.
1970 Lamborghini Lineup: Specs Compared
| Model | Engine | Power | 0-60 mph | Top Speed | 1970-era Production |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miura S | 3.9L V12, transverse mid-engine | 370 hp @ 7,700 rpm | ~6.7 sec | ~170 mph | Part of ~338-unit S run (1968-1971) |
| Espada Series II | 3.9L V12, front-engine | 350 hp @ 7,500 rpm | ~6.8 sec | ~150 mph | 575 units (1970-1972) |
| Jarama GT 400 | 3.9L V12, front-engine | 350 hp | 7.2 sec | ~155 mph | 177 units (1970-1973) |
| Urraco (debut only, not sold) | 2.5L V8, mid-engine | 220 hp (P250, from 1972) | N/A in 1970 | N/A in 1970 | 0 sold in 1970; production began 1972 |
Buying and Collecting Notes
None of these three cars trade like appliances, and the gap between them has widened over the past decade rather than narrowed. The Miura S commands the steepest premium of the group by a wide margin — it’s the model that defines the brand’s origin story, and buyers pay for that as much as for the driving experience. Espadas and Jaramas, by contrast, still sell for a fraction of Miura money despite sharing the same engine family and a similar level of hand-built exclusivity, which is exactly why collectors who actually want to drive their Lamborghini rather than trailer it tend to gravitate toward them.
Worth knowing if you’re shopping: the oil shocks that hit just a few years after these cars left the factory reshaped the entire supercar market almost overnight. Nineteen seventy-four in particular would prove to be one of the worst years in automotive history for anyone trying to buy a new car. The U.S. State Department’s account of the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo documents how quickly fuel prices and availability disrupted consumer demand across the industrialized world, and Lamborghini felt it directly — the Espada and Jarama were both discontinued by 1976, and the company nearly went under before the decade ended. That short production window is part of why clean, numbers-matching examples of the Espada Series II and Jarama GT 400 are genuinely hard to find today, even though period prices never approached Miura territory. Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy has a good breakdown of how that crisis unfolded in three distinct phases, which is useful context if you’re trying to understand why so few big-engine GTs from this exact era survived in original condition.
When you’re evaluating any of the three, matching chassis and engine numbers matter more than they do on later Lamborghinis, since Sant’Agata’s early-1970s recordkeeping wasn’t as tight as what came later. Get a specialist inspection before you commit — not a generic pre-purchase inspection, but someone who’s specifically worked on 1970s Lamborghini V12s and knows what a non-original cam or a re-stamped block looks like.
The Takeaway
Three cars, one V12 engine family, three completely different jobs: the Miura S for outright speed and status, the Espada Series II for a family that wanted 150 mph on tap, and the Jarama GT 400 for buyers who wanted the engine without the Espada’s size. The Urraco belongs in the story of 1970 as a preview, not a product — it wouldn’t put a wheel on the road for another two years. Get that distinction right and the rest of the year’s Lamborghini history actually makes sense.
Daniela Voss
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