[DeTomaso] Hemmings Sports & Exotics Article, "The Hybrid"

Garth Rodericks garth_rodericks at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 29 12:24:28 EDT 2010


http://www.hemmings.com/hsx/stories/2010/05/01/hmn_feature1.html

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1972 De Tomaso Pantera 
Related Content:Article

In Your Garage
Classified

1972 DeTomaso Panter
Sexy Italian sheetmetal wrapped around some grunty Stateside 
mechanicals is hardly a new concept. Strictly speaking, it's a hybrid, 
from the days when hybrid meant American power beneath the hood of a 
European GT, rather than buying a Prius to tell everyone how green you 
are. All manner of high-fallutin' GT cars that weren't called Ferrari, 
Aston Martin, Maserati, Lamborghini or Jaguar sought out the cheap, 
plentiful, torquey presence of American engines to power their 
otherwise-bespoke, high-end models. Gordon Keeble, Bizzarrini and Iso 
all turned to Chevrolet for their power (although Iso defected to Ford 
later on), while Dual-Ghia, Facel, Bristol and Jensen all looked to 
Highland Park, Michigan, for Mopar motivation. 


But those are GTs, where heritage meant less than style and comfort. A mid-engined sports car was a wild enough concept in those days, even 
though Alejandro de Tomaso himself introduced the notion with the 1965 
Vallelunga (yes, even before the Miura) after a series of unsuccessful 
Formula cars; throw in the notion of American power and the purists' 
heads would explode. So the Pantera is a sports car from a marque with 
no real racing pedigree of any note (the less said about Frank 
Williams's 505/38 that Piers Courage died in, the better), and not much 
more street-car experience (50-odd Cortina-powered Vallelungas and 400 
or so Mangustas over the previous half-decade). It had an engine just 
like the one you could get in a Torino, making up in sheer grunt what it lacked in sexy specifications, like overhead cams, fuel injection or 
aluminum components. It could have been a Corvette competitor, and was, 
in fact, brought to life after Ford couldn't make the GT40 streetable, 
but it smelled like a rebound relationship from the days when Hank the 
Deuce was courting Enzo Ferrari. And they wanted to sell 2,500 a year. 


 
In case selling such a beast would be too easy, they stuck 
it in Lincoln-Mercury stores, parked between Grand Marquis and Mark 
IIIs, since no one with $9,000 to spend on a car in those days was going to do it in a mere Ford dealership. What's more, Ford knew from the 
beginning that they were only going to be able to sell the Pantera 
through 1974: Even if the engine could somehow be properly tamed for the EPA's sniffers with pellet-type cats and lower-lift cams, there was no 
way it would survive 5-MPH crash tests, even with battering-ram bumpers. In this country, Pantera was a sports car with no past, and no future. 


To help us discover the Pantera enigma for ourselves, we hooked up 
with Leon Rower of Fletcher Hills, California; since 2004, he has been 
the owner and caretaker of this Grabber Blue '72 pre-L Pantera. When he 
bought it, it had the original white-letter Goodyear Arriva tires on it, and barely 20,000 miles on the odometer. And he let us go for a drive 
anyway. 


Despite having been designed for American-size frames, getting in 
will be a trick for many: Between the low roof (just three-and-a-half 
feet off the ground!) and that massive wheelwell that takes up half of 
what could be very generous foot room, wriggling your way in is not a 
happy task for the corpulent. It's a graceless entry and exit--getting 
in saw us sit down on the seat, wind our torso in under the roof and 
then swing our legs in, while exiting basically consisted of us opening 
the door and falling out of the car. 


Once you're in, all but the roundest of bellies are 
accommodated--the long-arm, short-leg driving position so prevalent in 
so many Italian machines is alive and well here--although headroom 
remains at a premium. Not helping is the notion that first gear, located down and to the left, wants to crawl into your lap and curl up for a 
nap. The seats don't have (or need) massive bolstering; when you're 
wedged between the console and door panel, such things matter less. The 
pedal box is deep, but thanks to the intruding wheelwell, everything 
feels offset toward the center; we had to pry off our size 11½s and 
drive in stocking feet. Our two feet were exactly as wide as the 
Pantera's three pedals. The odometer on Leon's clean, unrestored example reads 22,551 miles, every one of them original and accounted for. 


Visibility is hit or miss. The windscreen seems panoramic, but in 
fact, it's short and wide--the incredible view out the front has 
everything to do with the nose dropping away out of sight. (The downside is that it lets the sun soak in, to the degree that the pitiful 
ventilation system can't cope--although we didn't experience this on our cool evening drive.) Your head is close enough to the side glass that 
the low roof and high sills matter little--you can see out your window 
just fine. Yet the steering wheel blocks the main gauges--the tach from 
4,000 RPM to 6,000 RPM and (rather crucially) the speedometer from 20 to 120 miles an hour are completely blocked. The ancillary gauges are 
stacked between the bottom of the dash and the top of the console, and 
can only occasionally be seen, thanks to ambient glare. 


Turn the key, wedged way under the steering column where it can 
barely be viewed, much less felt, and the big Cleveland alights, soon 
settling into a relatively smooth 900-RPM idle. It sounds eager--deep, 
but not in that mellow, burbly muscle-car way like you'd expect to hear 
in a Mercury Cyclone with 10 feet of exhaust pipe and a couple of 
mufflers between the manifolds and the back of the car. It's 
smoother--no rumpity cam here. And it feels more immediate--the upshot 
of having the engine inches behind your ear, rather than a yard in 
front. 


The old saw that many muscle-car guys have about four-barrel 
Clevelands--that down-low torque is lost in favor of higher rev power 
because the heads and ports are too open to properly accommodate low-rev air velocities--goes out the window when it's pushing around a 
3,100-pound wedge. This engine is used to pushing around cars that weigh 600 pounds more than it's pushing now, so you bet that things are gonna feel snappy. Hard acceleration will make the nose feel just a tad 
floaty through the wheel--an unnerving feeling, whether the owner is 
sitting next to you advising you to stand on it or not. We oblige; who 
are we not to do as requested? At 3,000 RPM, you're making fine 
progress, but above 4,000 RPM, the engine, making its best Grand 
National-style noises right behind you, you're tempted to want to go 
find Richard Petty and pick a fight. Pulling to six grand proves little 
issue. So much for American engines not wanting to rev. 


Most of the major controls--throttle, clutch, steering wheel--demand you put your back into it, at least at around-town speeds. The gated 
shifter actually feels less finicky than it might appear to be--the 
stick slides from gear to gear with little resistance--but it still 
feels fragile enough that you don't want to rush shifts for fear of 
bending something. Turn-in is quick, there is little lean from the body 
despite the pressures we placed upon it, yet ride quality is compliant 
without approaching the crashy mess we half-expected; finding issues 
with the cornering required driving at super-legal speeds--something we 
weren't really able to pull off during San Diego's rush hour. 


The exhilarating driving experience is one thing, but 40 years on, 
hindsight shows us the larger picture. We know now that just 5,262 units came to the States, and just 7,158 were built from 1970 until its 
eventual passing in Europe--in 1993(!). Those hyper-optimistic sales 
numbers never came to pass, at least in part because transaxle 
manufacturer ZF could only build 40 of its five-speed units a week, thus limiting what Ford could sell anyway. We also know that build quality 
was reported to be so-so, though surely not any worse than other $10,000 Italian cars of the day. Ours drove, acted and felt fine. That didn't 
prevent Elvis from shooting his, though. 


Its dealer placement (beyond some sign-of-the-cat doublespeak) seems odd, but Pantera now looks to be among the vanguard in a perpetual 
program that tried to inject moribund Lincoln-Mercury dealers with 
something fun and flashy to drive customers in the door. The plan 
started at the dawn of the '70s with the original European Capri, then 
followed on with the Merkur XR4Ti and Scorpio sedans, and later the 
Australian-built Capri roadster. You could even wedge the 
Mazda-designed, Mexican-built Tracer in there if you were feeling 
generous. Whether they sold well or not, whether they drove traffic into the showroom or not, they certainly made Lincoln-Mercury stores more 
interesting places to visit. A concentrated effort to bring interesting 
overseas machinery to American shores, whatever the sales results, 
should be acknowledged and applauded. 


And, rather than isolating itself in a gulf between pure-bred sports car fans and muscle-car hooligans, which the Pantera could well have 
done, it's managed to bridge the gap between them, offering the best of 
both worlds. Orphans are often like that: Fieros and Corvairs, for 
example, tend not to mix with other Pontiacs and Chevys--they generally 
keep company among other Fieros and Corvairs. Ever see a Dual-Ghia at a 
Mopar show? No one knows what to make of it. But you can take a Pantera 
to an Italian car event like Concorso Italiano, and you'd get admiring 
glances, some earnest questions and no real snobbery. You could take it 
to a muscle-car show and the reaction would be much the same. Although 
each side sees it as an outlier, a curiosity, both sides give it a pass; it really does have a firm footing in either camp, rather than floating between them. It could be a wall, but it's a bridge. 


It makes sense: Pantera brings the best of both worlds into a single package. The four-barrel Cleveland is tunable; engine parts are 
plentiful and cheap at the local NAPA. At the same time, world-class 
handling is available at the turn of a wheel, with engineering upgrades 
(not to mention wheel-and-tire swaps) available. What the Pantera isn't 
fades away as a driver discovers (or reaffirms) instead what it is: 
fast, sexy fun that doles out the pleasure on its own terms, 
unencumbered by history or expectation. 
________________________________
 
Owner's Story
I bought this car as an unrestored original back in 2004; I had been looking for one like this for three 
years. It even came with the original Goodyear Arriva tires. I love the 
Grabber Blue color, and I love the car's styling--it really passes the 
test of time. 
I drive it a couple of times a month, mostly back and forth to 
shows--I put on about 500 miles a year, maybe. I always drive it--it's 
never trailered, despite the low mileage. The power is just incredible, 
and I love that I can work on it in my own garage. 
--Leon Rower 
________________________________
 
What to Pay
Low: $26,000
Average: $40,000
High: $60,000 
________________________________
 
Club Scene
Pantera Owners Club of America
www.poca.com
Dues: $75/year; 
Membership: 1,000 
________________________________
 
Pros and cons
Pros
All-original, bar the tires
Surprisingly decent ride
Sweet, sweet torque 


Cons
Getting inside
Stiff controls
Shifter feels fragile 
________________________________
 
1972 De Tomaso Pantera
ENGINE
Type: Water-cooled V-8, iron block and 
heads
Displacement: 5,750cc (351-cu.in.)
Bore x stroke: 101.6 x 
89mm
Compression ratio: 10.5:1
Horsepower @ RPM: 305 @ 5,800
Torque @ RPM: 380-lbs.ft. @ 3,400
Main bearings: 5
Fuel system: Single four-barrel Autolite carburetor, 780CFM
Ignition system: 
12-volt
Lubrication system: Gear-driven, internal presure
Exhaust system: Dual headers 


TRANSMISSION
Type: 5-speed manual ZF transaxle
Ratios: 1st 2.23:1
2nd: 1.47:1
3rd: 1.04:1
4th: 0.85:1
5th: 0.71:1
Final drive: ratio 4.22:1 


STEERING
Type: Rack and pinion
Turns, 
lock-to-lock: 3.1
Turning circle: 39 feet 


BRAKES
Type: Dual-circuit, hydraulic activation
Front: 11.1 inches
Rear: 11.2 inches 


CHASSIS & BODY
Construction: Monocoque
Body style: Two-passenger sports coupe
Layout: Mid-engine, 
rear-wheel drive 


SUSPENSION
Front: Independent; unequal length 
control arms, coil springs, anti-roll bar
Rear: Independent; unequal length control arms, coil springs, anti-roll bar 


WEIGHTS & MEASURES
Wheelbase: 98.4 inches
Overall length: 167 inches
Overall width: 67 inches
Overall 
height: 43.4 inches
Front track: 57 inches
Rear track: 58 inches
Curb weight: 3,123 pounds 


WHEELS & TIRES
Wheels: Campagnolo cast 
magnesium
Front: 15 x 7 inches
Rear: 15 x 8 inches
Tires: 
B.F. Goodrich Radial T/A
Front: 185/70r15
Rear: 215/70r15 


CAPACITIES
Crankcase: 4 quarts
Cooling 
system: 23 quarts
Fuel tank: 20 gallons 


CALCULATED DATA
Hp per cc: 0.054
Weight per 
hp: 10.07 pounds
Weight per CID.: 8.89 pounds 


PERFORMANCE
0-60 MPH: 5.5 seconds
¼ mile ET: 14.0 seconds @ 99.4 MPH
Top speed: 145 MPH 


PRICE
Base price: $10,000 
This article originally appeared in the MAY 1, 2010 issue of Hemmings 
Sports & Exotic Car.
Order Backissues of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car Here 



      


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