“SUPERCAR” IS BORN It is legend that “supercar,” the title bestowed upon all of today’s highest-performance automobiles, was first applied in print to the Lamborghini Miura, by L.J.K.

Setright in a 1967 Car story regarding his 1,000-mile drive of the new Miura from Modena to London.

He never used the word, but he said it in more elegant prose: “The exultant whoop of a thoroughbred V12 is like nothing else in motoring.

It is immediate, urgent, peremptory.

The Lambo idles at about 800 rpm and a gentle blip up to 2,000 produced a sort of instant quickening of everybody in the square, like a WO calling parade to attention…It might develop 87.5bhp per litre, but from ridiculously low revs it would pull as smoothly and inexorably as a Silver Ghost.

Clearly this was going to be an astonishing motor car.” And it was.

Setright summed up his review with one of the best capstones in automotive journalism: “Free-fall parachuting probably gives the same sensation at a fraction of the cost, bu...