my basic aim was to get weight out of the car. If you can save, say, two or three hundred kilos, you don’t need massive horsepower to propel it

Piet Pulford is one of those people who are just naturally lucky. A couple of hours ago we set off in his recently completed Lamborghini Jota replica. The car has done virtually no road miles since it was built and we’re about to drive it from Gstaad to Monaco on the Miura 40th Anniversary Tour. We’ll be lucky if the fuel consumption creeps into double figures, the car has no fuel gauge and Piet has no idea how much petrol is in the tank.

Shall we fill up just after the start? ‘Nah, we’ll be alright,’ says Piet confidently.

Amazingly, we get a couple of hours’ driving under our belt before the engine stutters and its V12 roar is replaced by the quiet clicking of a fuel pump running dry. But we’re drifting down a mountain pass, so the car keeps rolling. Twenty seconds later, we round a corner and there’s the Swiss-French border.

Complete with petrol station. And a pump selling 98-octane fuel. ‘You jammy bugger!’ seems the only suitable response. But Piet deserves some good luck, having spent 15 years and a medium-sized fortune  in creating a perfect replica of the one-and-only Lamborghini Jota. Built in 1970 as a personal testbed by Lamborghini development engineer Bob Wallace, the Jota (pronounced ‘Yota’) was a kind of über-Miura, more race than road car. Its career was exceptionally short-lived; after being sold to Italian company Interauto in February 1972, it was heavily crashed and subsequently written off. Although a number of so-called Jota replicas were commissioned by insistent customers in the early 1970s, notably the German Lamborghini importer Hubert Hahne, these were mere pastiches of the original, civilised and tamed to make them more acceptable for road use.

No-one knows where the name Jota came from. In the 1982 book Miura (still available as a facsimile reprint from Mercian Manuals), co-authors Coltrin and Marchet suggest that it’s because the car was built to Appendix J of the FIA regulations. Others have claimed that it’s named after a Spanish dance; yet others say that it has something to do with atomic fission... One thing’s for sure – given that the Italian language has no letter ‘J’, the UK registration that Piet Pulford has secured (see picture above) could not be bettered.

Fortunately for Piet, who has been obsessed with  the Miura since he saw one during a school trip to London in the late ’60s, Bob Wallace is still active. A taciturn New Zealander, who in 1960s press photos always looks as though he’d be happier working on a sheep station than mixing with flash Italians in suits and shades, Bob now lives in Arizona and fixes early Ferrari race engines in his spare time. ‘I thought Piet was stark, raving mad when he first came to me,’ says Bob in one of his rare bursts of emotion. ‘But he’s done an extremely nice job – and the workmanship is probably better than mine was on the original.’

Bob built the original Jota pretty much for his own amusement, working in tandem with chief engineer Paolo Stanzani. ‘It was almost a toy,’ he continues in his languid Kiwi drawl. ‘Italian cars were always overweight and I wanted something lighter to play around with. Because the Miura had become an overnight commercial success, it went into production way before any proper development could be done and it only got half-arse reasonable with the SV series. There were some major rigidity problems with the early cars, due to a lack of collaboration between ourselves and Bertone; the centre section could have been made ten times stronger.

These cars weren’t built by God but by mere kids like us!

‘The Jota allowed me to make some major chassis revisions and try out new ideas. We had an enormously good relationship with Pirelli’s R&D department and could use its private test track whenever we wanted, so the Jota was also useful for tyre development too. But my basic aim was to get weight out of the car. If you can save, say, two or three hundred kilos, you don’t need massive horsepower to propel it.’

Except that, of course, the Jota did have massive horsepower. Its engine was a dry-sumped, ported and polished version of the Miura’s 4-litre V12, and produced what Bob describes as ‘400 and change’  horsepower. ‘An output of 100bhp per litre was pretty good in the 1960s,’ he points out. ‘But we didn’t do anything particularly special to the engine; just cleaned it up internally. And we strengthened the transmission housing with a big steel plate – otherwise the engine had a tendency to walk away from the diff’ casing when you applied full power.’

For the replica Jota, Bob built an engine and transmission that duplicated the original car’s as closely as possible. Starting point for the project was a tired early Miura, found in the USA. The all-new bodywork and extensive chassis revisions were contracted out to Chris Lawrence of Wymondham Engineering in Norfolk – no relation to the Chris Lawrence of Deep Sanderson fame, featured in last month’s Octane – who did a fantastic job of creating the fragile alloy nose and tail sections, which are held on by locating pins and Dzus fasteners and simply lift off rather than being hinged as on a Miura. Tragically, Chris died from cancer just a few months ago.

Final assembly was handled by another Norfolk outfit, Roger Constable of The Car Works, Ashwellthorpe. Roger is full of praise for Chris’s craftsmanship but admits that getting the nose and tail to fit once the engine, dry-sump oil tank and plumbing had been installed was something of a trial. While the sections attach very neatly, feeding these large, cumbersome yet delicate structures over the radiator and fuel filler caps at the front, and the monster quad exhaust pipes at the back, is frustratingly fiddly.

Ah yes, the exhausts. They are the Jota’s defining feature, both visually and aurally. Piet has had a set of restrictors made up for the Bofors cannonsized tail pipes but on this debut run down to Monaco he can’t resist leaving them off. Every time one of us cranks the starter and the V12 explodes into life behind our heads I think of the opening scenes of Le Mans.

You sit low and casual in the Jota, legs spread as if slouched in your favourite TV-viewing easy chair. The screen sweeps around in panoramic Stratos fashion and the broad sills, each of which contains a 60-litre fuel tank, create useful elbow room on either side. There’s lots of black-painted sheet alloy, blue Dymo labels with evocative Italian descriptions, and a total absence of anything soft or forgiving. The foot pedals are reassuringly large and well spaced, their broad metal treads looking as if they’ve been lifted from one of Cavaliere Lamborghini’s tractors, but it’s impossible for the driver to release the handbrake without brushing an elbow against the rear bulkhead. That’s a mistake you make only once: after being cooked for a couple of hours by four litres of tuned V12, that sheet of alloy gets as hot as the baking tray under your Christmas turkey.

But the clutch is surprisingly light and you can trickle the Jota away on a whiff of throttle – just as well, for the sake of the hearing of anyone standing within 40 feet. The steering is light, too, despite the 9.5-inch section front tyres (the rears measure an incredible 12.5 inches across). Rearward vision is non-existent, of course, but otherwise the Jota isn’t difficult to drive. It does make a fantastic sound. Forget all the usual niceties of induction hiss, valve train chatter and the other nuances that journalists like to use to pep up their copy: the Jota is simply raw, animal, noise. It’s loud at idle and it just gets louder as you pile on the revs. At low engine speeds it sounds as though someone is blowing a tuba  traight into your ear; then at around 3000rpm the brassy blast becomes a little ragged, as though the two banks of cylinders have got out of synch; but get past that and it sweetens into the most glorious, red-blooded howl you can imagine.