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This morning I saw...

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Nunyas

Nunyas

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a Pantera being driven around the area where I work. Wish I had my camera handy... it was sort of exciting to see at the time. I've never seen one being driven in person before. I don't know much about them, but the version of the car I saw had none of the fender flares or spoilers that I normally see attached to them in pictures. It was a really sharp looking car. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif
 
Gotta love the Pantera.....Theres one around me that I see sometimes that also missing the flares and wings....this ones very nicely restored..I drool everytime I see it.
 
I saw a Yellow Pantera drive down the street,turn around,
& then stop in front of my house.
Turned out a friend of mine bought one.I was surprised to find out that they used some Lucas parts!Turn signal switches,ignition switches,etc.
I imagine if the box says Ghia,instead of Lucas,that the parts are more expensive.

- Doug
 
I used to lust after one in my neighborhood. I used to own a '69 Ford Torino with the 351 V8 that was used in the Pantera. My Torino was surprisingly fast but the Pantera 351 had a little more juice than mine and with the smaller body/lighter weight it was a stormer for its time. I think about 5.5 seconds to 60.
 
that's still respectable acceloration even today. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif
 
Panteras actually weren't that fast when new, mostly because of the horrible Goodyear Arrivas. Sixty was mid-sixes. Fun, uncomfortable, loud (both inside and outside,) and unmistakable.

Absolutely guaranteed to have been in an accident or have required significant rust repair. You don't get many non-exotic production cars (hey, it was sold via Lincoln dealers, so that's why I say it isn't really an exotic,) that are more expensive to restore. The transmission is shared in basic components with the GT40, so if you need to replace it, you're not going to like the bill.
 
I saw one in Dallas once, it had CA tags, and 3 people in it. 1 three-year-old, and a very haggard adult couple. This was back even before the "baby-on-board" window thingies, but surely they didn't come all that way as a set.
 
Cool car. I actually rode in one from Roanoke, VA to Summit Point racetrack, WVA.

One word comes to mind: LOUD!

We had to wear ear plugs for the approximately 3 hour trip. With a 351 Ford V/8 about two feet from your ears (mid-engine design, modified engine with headers), the noise was unusually bothersome. But, the car would fly. Very sexy car, attracted a lot of attention.

Not sure why the car never took off, it was way ahead of it's time. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cheers.gif
 
My source (Quentin Willson's "Great cars") said that if you were taller than 5'10" you might have real trouble fitting in one. Another reason they didn't continue in the US was that things got real tight with emission controls in the early 70's and Ford bailed.
 
As a 6'4" guy -- I can tell you that driving a Pantera is murder. It is also important that you have size 5 feet, since the pedals are so close together, you literally need ballet dancer feet in order to ensure you hit one pedal and not three with one foot! (Plus the pedals are offset to the right.)

The car can be heard from roughly four blocks away. The factory headers lead right to the muffler and the tips -- so about a foot of space between the engine and the tips!

As for why the Pantera didn't take off: the story is actually very simple. The cars were sold via Lincoln dealers, who had no idea how to sell a sports car, much less service one. The car had horrible reliability, and the media test cars kept overheating, ensuring that nobody could publish accurate performance numbers.

At$10,000 the cars were extremely expensive, too.

After a couple years of very poor sales, FordMoCo pulled the plug on the distribution deal.
 
Actually,the more I saw the Pantera,the less I was in awe of it.I thought I'd never say that.

- Doug
 
[ QUOTE ]
...As for why the Pantera didn't take off: the story is actually very simple. The cars were sold via Lincoln dealers, who had no idea how to sell a sports car, much less service one....
...At$10,000 the cars were extremely expensive, too.
After a couple years of very poor sales, FordMoCo pulled the plug on the distribution deal.

[/ QUOTE ]

And then DeTomaso went on to keep building and selling them until 1993.

My understanding is that Ford wanted to take control of Detomaso, and they parted ways mad at each other.

Anyway... Here's somemore history of the car...
https://www.panteraclub.com/pantera.htm
 
The president of the local Pantera club is an acquaintance from cruise nights. One Saturday night last September, he rode with me in the TR8 in a bumper-to-bumper cruise through downtown Golden because the slow speed of the cruisers always caused his engine to overheat.

Sammy, Jeff is 6-foot and about 250 (without narrow feet, either), but he and his club drive their Panteras from Denver to Las Vegas every year for the national Pantera convention. Of course, they don't drive slow on I-70 and I-15, so overheating is not a problem (although noise and the Utah Highway Patrol certainly are). /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/jester.gif
 
God I've always loved that car, what a brute. Friend of mine in college, his dad had an 86 GTS. He was at a Ford swap meet in the early 90's, maybe 90 or 91, and found a basically new zero mile 71 Boss 351 motor, which he bought and put in the car. For those not in the know, the Boss 351 was, IMO, one of the ultimate motors that Ford has ever produced. The Boss 302's and 429's got all the press and glory, but both were motors designed for the track (the 302 trans am road courses and the 429 NASCAR high speed ovals)and didn't really come into their own in daily use on the street. The Boss 351 was perfect for the street and featured 4 bolt mains, a solid lifter cam, the larger 4V port heads, 11.7:1 compression, forged pistons and rods, an aluminum intake, nodular crank, dual point distributor, and a 750 cfm carb. For many years the 1971 Boss 351 was the fastest Mustang built, second only to the Boss 429, which is impressive considering the 71-73 Stangs were the largest and heaviest years built. Unfortunately the Boss 351 only survived that one year, 1971. Anyway, my friends father found one of these motors and had it put into his Pantera, the result was simply incredible. The thing accelerated so hard it felt like my eyeballs were being driven into the back of my skull, my kind of car. Haven't talked to the guy in several years, don't know if his dad still has it. Italian exotic styling meets Ford power and reliability.
 
I agree on the Pantera Being the best of American Engine Meets Italian car builder...

But the ULTIMATE ford engine is the SOHC 657hp dual quad 427 Cammer that was developed for nascar to compete with the Chrysler Hemi - but was denied by rule changes (ford woulda kicked all their a$$'s), and used in the A/FX Factory Experimental Mustangs, and becoming the basis for a few supercharged Top Fuel dragsters! Most awsome ford engine that ever left from a factory - Before or since! I'd give my left *** for 3 of them!
 
There are some great scale models of that Cammer engine, Kenny. I saw some on close out at Harbor Freight Tools.

Since the seats in the Pantera are so terrible, a popular swap is to put in C4 Corvette seats. Honestly, I never liked the C4 seats either!

I had never heard that Ford wanted to buy DeTomaso. There were a lot of rumors about how the deal soured, but mostly it was simply a complete lack of sales, and then back-and-forth blame (car quality vs. poor sales/marketing.)
 
My neighbors had one.
When they got divorced, it went up for sale, but this was in the mid-80s, when I was completly broke. It sat in their garage for about a year before someone finally picked it up.
The previous comment about them being rust-buckets is really true.
When I was about 14, I really liked cars like this (Ford-GTs, Panteras, Contachs, Lolas, etc). Nowadays, I have no interest in these types of cars....I much prefer vintage-type, open roadsters.
 
[ QUOTE ]
I used to lust after one in my neighborhood. I used to own a '69 Ford Torino with the 351 V8 that was used in the Pantera. My Torino was surprisingly fast but the Pantera 351 had a little more juice than mine and with the smaller body/lighter weight it was a stormer for its time. I think about 5.5 seconds to 60.

[/ QUOTE ]


I had a '75 Torino with a 351M engine in it. It had smaller, lighter body weight to it as well. There was no metal left /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif but it was sure fast.
And I thought LBC's rusted... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/nonod.gif


Paul
 
I've always loved Torinos, my wife had a 72 as her first car. A kid I knew in high school had a 70 GT with the 351 (windsor), I used to run him in my 67 Stang and later my Nova, lots of fun. The 351M was a derivation of the cleveland motor (series 335 engines), the M stood for modified. The M series also included the 400. Not many fans of those motors with the performance Ford crowd these days, they were really developed to replace the 429/460 series motors in large Ford cars and trucks, and as such developed a lot of torque and grunt down low but didn't do as well at the top end, nothing like what the original cleveland was capable of at redline (sounds like a TR motor /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif). They were also developed specifically to meet new and stricter emissions requirements, which the 429/460 motors could never meet. I dearly loved my cleveland Mach 1, IMO the original cleveland was Fords best small block motor, period. Amazing low end torque and it could continue to make oodles of power all the way to redline. The tag line when the cleveland was first introduced was that it was the small block that ran like a big block, and I believe it. Day comes I finally get another vintage Stang it'll probably get a Cleveland.

I forgot about the Cammer, that was a mind blowing motor no doubt but out there in the realm of being so exotic that the average guy will basically never be able to own or build one. My first job after college I worked with a guy who had a 69 Boss 429 Stang, the car was a complete mess and undergoing a total resto. He told me the cost of rebuilding the motor alone was almost to much for him and he had thought about selling the car off and getting something less exotic, like just a regular big block fastback. Don't know what ever happened to that car, or the guy for that matter. My dad drove a 69 Boss 429 when they were new, he knew a guy who knew a guy who had one, something like that. To much money and to hard to get, he ended up buying a new 69 428 CJ Mach 1 instead.
 
I liked my '69 Torino for several reasons-- it was comfortable, large enough for taking on trips, and most of all it was a real sleeper. It was a two door hardtop with dual exhausts but just a plain light green color, small hubcaps, nothin' fancy-- but it would go. I did what young folks do and tried to see who I could surprise. Once real tires started to come available that helped too.
 
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