Driving the world’s first supercars – car pictures of the week
In issue 346 of evo, we get behind the wheel of the Bentley Blower, Mercedes-Benz 300SL, AC Cobra, Ford GT40 and Lamborghini Miura to trace the origins of the supercar. These are our favourite shots
What was the world’s first supercar? The deeper you dig into this question, the more difficult it becomes to answer. Supercars have and always will be a collection of elements, from performance to dramatic styling and rarity, and pinning down exactly what point in history these came together in one whole is always a matter of debate.
In the latest issue of evo, we trace the origins of the supercar by driving five past icons that could lay claim to being the first: the Bentley Blower, Mercedes-Benz 300SL, AC Cobra, Ford GT40 and Lamborghini Miura. To read the full feature, pick up a copy of evo 346 in store or online via the evo shop.
On the surface, the Bentley Blower couldn’t be further from today’s notion of a supercar – it’s certainly not a shape school children would scribble in class – but in how it stretched the performance envelope of automobiles at the time, it’s absolutely in the conversation. It was effectively a race car for the road (50 road-legal examples were commissioned to homologate the Blower for motorsport), with 240bhp and a 125mph top speed – hugely impressive numbers for a near 100-year-old car.
The 300SL is another car born from motorsport, making its debut in 1954 as a descendent of a Mercedes race car from two years earlier. With a low-slung body and its famous gullwing doors it gets much closer to the supercar aesthetic we know today, and packs 215bhp from its 3-litre straight-six. A 155mph top speed is competitive even amongst modern performance cars.
While Europe was evolving the performance car formula, America didn’t sit still. In the 1960s the Shelby Cobra emerged combining a compact open-top body with massive firepower from a Ford small-block V8. Early cars were capable of hitting 60mph in the low four-second range, while later cars – packing monstrous 485bhp 7-litre engines – could hit 100mph in just 8.8sec. In the same period, Carroll Shelby was also hard at work developing the Ford GT40 – a dominant Le Mans winning race car, of course, but also a seriously fast and desirable road car in its later forms.
The GT40 served as inspiration for a supercar that set the template for decades to come – the Lamborghini Miura. A mid-mounted V12, stunning Gandini-designed bodywork and a top speed of 172mph made it one of the most advanced and desirable production cars when it launched in 1965. It also started a lineage of mid-engined V12 Lamborghinis that continues today with the Revuelto.
To read about the evolution of the supercar through the decades, and what they feel like to experience today, pick up a copy of evo 346 in-store or online.
