Alejandro De Tomaso (1928-2002) surely would have enjoyed the new breed of mid-engine supercars like the Chrysler ME412 and Porsche Carrera GT. That's because he did much to kindle interest in mid-engine sports cars with two landmarks in automotive design, the Mangusta and the Pantera.
Born into a prominent family in Argentina, De Tomaso lost his father (a government minister) at an early age and left school at fifteen to run his family's extensive cattle ranches. He was crazy for cars, and he raced a Bugatti 35 in 1945 at a local event. De Tomaso emigrated to Italy in 1955 when his anti-government newspaper got him embroiled in the overthrow of Argentine dictator Juan Pern.
De Tomaso found work as a test driver for OSCA, and there he met Elizabeth Haskell, the granddaughter of GM's legendary Billy Durant, who was shopping for a car to further her impressive career as a racing driver in the United States. They began racing together with notable success, soon married, and her fortune helped De Tomaso start his own car company in 1959.
At the 1963 Turin auto show, De Tomaso introduced the Vallelunga, a small but voluptuous mid-engine car with a backbone-type frame. After a deal to produce a Can-Am racing car for Carroll Shelby came to nothing, De Tomaso adapted the chassis of the Pete Brock-designed racer with its 4.7-liter Ford V8 to a scaled-up iteration of the Vallelunga's frame, and hired Carrozeria Ghia to produce a body. The Giorgetto Giugiaro-designed Mangusta (or mongoose, the cobra's deadly enemy) was the hit of the 1966 Turin show, and production by Ghia began in 1967.
By 1969, De Tomaso had bought a nearly bankrupt Ghia in dubiouscircumstances, and then persuaded Ford's Lee Iacocca to acquire it as a source of design and show-car manufacture. Most important, Iaccoca agreed to import a revised Mangusta to America.
The Pantera went into production in 1971 with a unit-body chassis engineered by Gian Paolo Dallara and a practical body styled by Tom Tjaarda. Imported by Lincoln-Mercury at a price of just $10,000, the Pantera was the first affordable mid-engine supercar. Unfortunately, the worldwide fuel crisis of 1973 killed the Pantera by 1974, a year in which Ferrari sold only 28 cars and Lamborghini just 19.
De Tomaso continued to produce the Pantera in small numbers until 1990, but he turned his attention to the acquisition and management of Maserati and Innocenti, and then later the manufacture of the ill-fated Qvale Mangusta (which has since morphed into the Maserati Spider).
Like Billy Durant and Lee Iacocca, and indeed all great automotive executives, he was a bit of a flim-flam man, rushing from one good idea to another without properly finishing any of them. De Tomaso was urbane, volatile and willful when I photographed him at his factory in Modena in 1990, but I remember him best from the Fifties when I met him at the race track. He was with Elizabeth Haskell, a husky, attractive blonde who was the sister of a guy I had known at Pomfret, a prep school in Connecticut. De Tomaso was a racer, willing to take chances, and maybe that's why his career as an industrialist unfolded the way it did.