The Lancia Aurelia was the original modern GT

Seeing it at Bicester got me thinking again about B20s. Those thoughts long ago stopped being about buying one, because anything remotely presentable is nowadays into six figures, but I have been lucky enough to drive a couple over the years and to be driven in one much longer ago, when no-one except the cognoscenti cared about them.

When I was a teenager, and not quite old enough to drive, I had a friend whose father was certainly a cognoscento. An aeronautical engineer, he worked his way through a couple of Borgwards before alighting on first a Lancia Aprilia, then on an Aurelia B20. All were a bit battered, some way beyond mere patination, but all were much loved and driven with gusto. The Aurelia had been owned when new by Mike Hawthorn, but by the time my friend's father owned it there was a fair square footage of missing metalwork.

No matter. It still sounded great and, it seemed to me, went like the wind. My friend and I had been to a Genesis concert, and we were waiting for her father to pick us up. He came in the Aurelia, its engine note tingling my ears as it approached despite the battering from some very different tunes they had taken earlier. In 1971, the only V6s regularly heard in Britain were those made by Ford – indeed my father had one, a 2.5-litre Zephyr – but the Lancia's sound was altogether crisper, snappier, freer-breathing. It set the template of what a V6 should sound like.

It did that not just because it sounded the best, but also because the Aurelia's motor was the world's first production V6. Lancia was the obvious company to achieve this feat, having pioneered all manner of vee-engines with unlikely vee-angles (generally very narrow) thanks to an obsession with squeezing more cylinders into a length normally occupied by fewer. What started out as a wartime idea to give the pre-war, but technically advanced, Aprilia some extra pace soon evolved into a plan for a new, larger car to make the best use of Francesco de Virgilio's new motor.

He had already worked out that a 60-degree vee-angle was required to give the engine perfect mechanical balance, something not always a part of Lancia's vee-engine designs either hitherto or afterwards, and a curious system of valve rockers operating at 90 degrees to the usual orientation kept the engine as narrow as it could be while still allowing the part-spherical combustion chambers then considered best for power.

The new engine, with block and heads in aluminium, had a capacity of just 1,754cc as launched to the world in 1950. It powered a shapely saloon dubbed B10, under whose skin lurked independent rear suspension by semi-trailing arms, with a combined gearbox and differential – a transaxle – between them. A year later, the engine grew to 1,991cc for the first B20 GT, styled by Ghia with a fastback tail and a sparing, barely-adorned sleekness.

Here, it was soon realised, was the world's first truly modern GT: forward-looking body with no pre-war design hangovers, vee-configuration engine, all-independent suspension. The prototype was the sensation of the Turin show, so Lancia commissioned Ghia to build bodies for a production run, some examples sub-contracted to Viotti because Ghia couldn't make them all by itself. Then Pininfarina came on board, too, and from the second series onwards (of six, made right up to 1958), it made all the bodies – over 100 hand-beaten panels welded together in every one of them – until Bertone and Maggiora later shared the load.

Half-way through production, the rear suspension was redesigned as a De Dion axle to cure a tail-happiness that might have spooked a driver not blessed with the skills of Hawthorn, Fangio or Jean Behra. All three racing drivers owned Aurelias and loved them for the way they drove and the way they looked, but whether with or without De Dion suspension I can't say – except in the case of the Hawthorn car, a 1955 fourth-series version with the later suspension and the V6 in its most muscular guise, 2,451cc and 118bhp.

That car, registered WPD 10, has been beautifully restored in recent years by a Lancia Motor Club member who enthused in the club magazine about the precision of its engineering and the joy of getting it all to work again as it should. Although, even in its decrepitude, it still felt pretty good to a teenage me.

Nearly four decades later, I drove a fifth-series B20, a car much like WPD 10 but left-hand-drive, slightly heavier and slightly less powerful. Those nuances didn't matter, though; what mattered was the pulsating blare from the twin exhausts overlaid by a mechanical whine, the sense of balance once you were leaning hard on the springy but precise steering in a fast bend, the modern-car sense of structural stiffness, the way this GT clung to its cornering line regardless of bumps. Heaviness of controls apart, the B20's dynamics were a remarkable prelude to modernity.

To own an Aurelia B20 GT is to own a piece of automotive sculptural engineering, and to buy into a lost world of high-speed driving flamboyance on fast, thrilling roads between Europe's racetracks. The Lancia Motor Club has a trackday at Goodwood every spring. And a few Aurelias, maybe road spec, maybe race spec, usually come out to play. But none is ever going to be mine.