Paul and Linda McCartney Wearing Moon Boots and Posing in Front of Their Lamborghini Espada, ca. 1970s

Paul McCartney’s 1972 Lamborghini Espada was sold soon after his wife forgot to set the brake and it rolled into a pond... and years later wound up in a nightclub bar over a table.

Paul McCartney had a bit of a thing about Lamborghinis for a while and his first was a 400GT in 1967. He also owned an Espada and, the story goes, someone phoned up about an ad for the car. The owner’s secretary picked up the phone and said: “Come have a look,” giving him directions to an address in London.

When he got there, it was McCartney selling the car. He showed him around the car – red, with a fairly hideous matching red interior. He was quite taken with it, was getting on well with the ex-Beatle, and about to make an offer when McCartney said: “Look, I don’t want to sell it to you. I like you and, to be honest, it’s not a good car.”

It turned out that Linda McCartney had left it parked one night with the handbrake off and it had rolled into a pond. After three days, Sir Paul pulled it out because a Lambo in the lake isn’t very ecological. Because of some kind of emotional attachment to it, he had the Lambo rebuilt for around £70,000. “But, if you want a Lamborghini that’s mint, and has never been in a pond,” he said, “this isn’t the one.” With its Italian electronics and complex V12 now full of pond water, it was never quite the same.

However, in 1979 the Fritzy Lambo was eventually sold on probably to a Rolling Stones fan. This once-proud S2 Espada – an Italian supercoupe that was once driven by the likes of the Shah of Iran and Valentino Balboni – spent most of the 1980s rotting on a suburban driveway in Buckinghamshire. In the early 1990s, in one final act of humiliation, McCartney’s Espada ended up as an ornament above a nightclub bar in Stoke-on-Trent.

In 2005 McCartney’s Lambo resurfaced on eBay, with bidding reaching £23,400 but failing to meet its reserve. It’s here that the trail of Macca’s soggy Espada runs cold. Rumor has it that the car now lives in Austria and has just undergone a total nut n’ bolt rebuild.