Pantera

De Tomaso Pantera

The De Tomaso Pantera's story begins not with a car but with a corporate courtship. In 1969 Ford Motor Company signed an agreement to exchange technical services with the Italian coachbuilder Ghia and with De Tomaso Automobili, including sending Ford staff to train at their Modena-area facilities. Lee Iacocca pushed the relationship further: in 1970 Ford bought an 80% stake in Ghia and its sister house Vignale, and in 1971 Ford took an 84% stake in De Tomaso Automobili itself, with founder Alejandro de Tomaso holding the remainder. Out of that partnership came a car designed to put a genuine mid-engine exotic into Lincoln-Mercury showrooms.

The Pantera itself was the work of Tom Tjaarda, an American-born designer working at Carrozzeria Ghia, with engineering led by Giampaolo Dallara, whom De Tomaso had lured away from Lamborghini. Unlike the earlier De Tomaso Mangusta and its steel backbone chassis, the Pantera used a steel monocoque. It was De Tomaso's first use of that construction, and a cheaper one to build. The car debuted in Modena in March 1970 and was shown at the New York Auto Show weeks later, wrapped around a Ford V8 mounted just behind the cockpit.

Ford began importing Panteras for the American market in late 1971, sold through a network of selected Lincoln-Mercury dealers. Day-to-day importation and sales ran through De Tomaso of America Inc. in Livonia, Michigan, while Lincoln-Mercury's Dearborn division handled service and warranty support, an unusual arrangement that put an Italian mid-engine exotic, built in small numbers at a Modena factory, behind the counter of an American mainstream dealer network. The first cars sold in the US, some 75 of them, had actually been hand-built at Carrozzeria Vignale for the European market before being redirected to America once the Ford deal closed. From 1972, US buyers could get the Pantera L ("Lusso"), with larger black bumpers to meet US requirements and a 248 hp Cleveland V8, and in 1974 a US-market "GTS" trim arrived. Confusingly, this US GTS was a cosmetics-only package, unchanged mechanically from the Pantera L. That is a genuinely different car from the European GTS introduced in spring 1972, which was a real performance variant aimed partly at Group 3 racing, with roughly 350 PS DIN, wider wheels, ventilated brakes, and other hardware the US GTS did not share. It was one of several places where the same badge meant different things on different continents.

The Ford era did not last. Meeting tightening US safety and emissions standards would have required an expensive redesign, and that cost landed just as the 1973 oil crisis reshaped demand away from thirsty exotics and insurance rates on high-performance imports climbed. Ford wound the import program down: the last Pantera built for North America left the factory around August 1974, Ford sold its De Tomaso stake back that same year, and a handful of dealers sold remaining inventory into 1975. Sources disagree on exactly how many Panteras Ford sold in the US across the whole import era. Lincoln-Mercury's own figure was 6,091, contemporary industry estimates put it as low as 5,233, and later retrospectives in Remember Road and Robb Report simply say "about 5,500".

With Ford gone, Alejandro de Tomaso resumed control of the company, reportedly inheriting around 200 incomplete Panteras that he finished on his own account, and kept the car in production for European and other international markets under his own distribution, a distinctly different arrangement from the Ford-backed US era, with no Lincoln-Mercury dealer network behind it. The narrow-body GTS continued to be built alongside newer variants until 1985. In November 1980 De Tomaso unveiled the wider-bodied GT5 at the Turin Motor Show; standard GT5 production ran until 1985, though special-order cars were still built as late as 1988. Its successor, the GT5-S, was shown at Turin in November 1984, with right-hand-drive cars reaching customers in early 1985; fewer than 200 GT5-S cars were built between 1985 and 1990.

The final chapter came in 1990, when De Tomaso unveiled the heavily reworked Pantera 90 Si, restyled by Marcello Gandini (of Miura and Countach fame), on a new tube-frame chassis with a smaller 5.0-liter (302 cu in) Ford V8 making around 305 bhp. Production numbers for the 90 Si are themselves disputed: 38 sold to the public by one account, 41 produced by another. Sources are similarly inconsistent about exactly when the line stopped: most put the end of overall Pantera production at 1992, with roughly 7,260 cars built across the full two-decade run, while the 90 Si is separately described as having been built into 1993, ahead of the De Tomaso Guarà taking its place. Between an early interim figure of 6,128 cars built in Modena by 1973 and the eventual total near 7,260, the Pantera's twenty-plus year production run was unusually long and geographically split for a car that began as a joint venture between an Italian coachbuilder and an American automaker.