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A passion for the brand led this young enthusiast to his first car and his first BMW.
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Films:
1972 De Tomaso Pantera: The Company Car Of Our V8 Dreams
I am just odl enough to remember seeing old Pantera catalogues in the back waiting areas of FLM dealerships when I was a wee lad. These have never appealed to me until a few years ago when I saw (thank you Jay Leno) what was possible. Since then I have really changed my mind about them. This one looks great (and I don’t even like red!). What a great story….another great film about those who love their cars, made for those who never need an explanation. Drive Tastefully!
I am in Windsor Ontario Canada. Where the *?! is that. Right across from Detroit City. The reasopn I mention it ios that I work at Ford where we produce the 5.0L. We had a benefit a couple of weeks ago and the guest of honor where 18 Panteras. Seeing so many in one spot was a real treat. The noise on the way out when they convoyed down the private road we are located at the plant was the bedt part of the day. Still They should have used the 351″ Windsor ” maybe a little bias here.
So nice this beautiful classic sports car and the spacy roads and lovely landscape. I drove a Pantera last year. The engine and “noise” so smooth. Unfortunately I am too tall and most of Swiss roads too small… When I am back in Sonoma Valley, visiting my relatives I would be ready for a Pantera ride!
Given the marine layer of mist and low hanging clouds, the coastal oaks and conifers, and the little town we see from the air in the beginning, my guess is that he is within 20 miles of Rancho Carrillo. North of Palomar. Somewhere down there, and at a little bit of altitude. Lovely spot. Maybe the producer can enlighten us.
This is the best looking {read: cleanest} version of this car IMHO and as Mr. Gonclaves noted the owner even went as far as removing the wipers to make the car even cleaner/slicker. The small European “bumperettes” add to this car’s appearance too. Having owned a GT 40 I can attest to the statement made by the owner that the two cars share DNA. Pantera values certainly have gone up but not quite to the level of a Dino 246 which is mentioned in the film. This is a very cool car to own and drive but if you’ve got wide feet the pedal box may not be for you.
The Italian dimensions on the pedal box were a concern at the Lincoln Mercury Division at the time. Management was worried about the Division’s liability. Lincoln Mercury had never sold a car like this, and for their customers the pedal spacing was an invitation to mistake the accelerator for the brake. Marketing at Lincoln Mercury knew one thing with surety, and that was that the typical customer for the marque knew almost nothing about how to handle a car with the potential of a the Pantera. While the introduction of the Pantera refreshed a marque that had become a little stale, with a product in a quite vibrant market sector, a lot of people at L-M were not happy about the car at the time. It was an odd marriage and not an enduring one.
The point I was trying to make here, (see below), is the simple one that cars we love, like the Pantera, often emerge not so much as the product of careful brand management, as they do, despite the best efforts of brand managers to kill them. Given the attrition rate of these kind of projects, the car has to be really good to survive the institutional opposition to innovation at this level. When these cars do percolate to the top and actually get ‘green lit’ for production they have already received enormous scrutiny. The engineers and designers have to believe deeply in these projects in order to get them into production. The combination of the two makes these cars as extraordinary as they are rare.
