De Tomaso Pantera GT5S
Exactly 30 years after taking delivery of this Pantera GT5S, its only owner tells its tale of wedding parades, engine meltdowns and hot laps with Whizzo Williams
Colin Bradshaw buys a De Tomaso Pantera in 1989
‘I’ve always had sports cars since before I could drive,’ quips Colin Bradshaw. ‘I had a Triumph GT6 at 16, but they’ve always been for short periods of time. I’ve had 40-odd cars to date, and I’ve gone through different eras and enthusiasms of ownership, including Lotus and Porsche periods.
‘It was during the Lotus phase when a black earlyseventies De Tomaso Pantera pulled up alongside my Esprit S2 at a petrol station while I was filling it up, and I thought to myself, “I will have one of those one day,” but at the time I couldn’t afford one, and I moved on to Porsche 911s instead.
‘However, Pantera prices were going up along with all supercars in the late Eighties, and people were buying them for silly money. I originally had a budget of £40,000, wanted a GT5, and started looking for a second-hand one. But people were mucking around with the prices back then. I found one for £40,000, then before long it was £45,000, then £46,000, and I thought to myself, what does a new one cost, £48,000?
‘I got in touch with the UK De Tomaso importer, and he told me I’d have to place an order soon as they were stopping production of the current model imminently. When I went to order the car, they said they were only doing full-spec GT5S cars – 400bhp, 0-60mph in 5.1 seconds, 170mph top speed, marquetry inlay in the doors, bucket seats, radio kit, rear wing, side-stripes and a 4.00:1 differential. De Tomaso wouldn’t build me one otherwise. We agreed on a price of £52,000, and it was supposed to arrive in October 1989.
‘I was using dealer Bramleys as an agent, and the deal involved them buying my Porsche, but the only De Tomaso importer was Emilia Concessionaires at Silverstone. Despite the importer’s promise, it didn’t arrive until 9 May 1990 at 11:30am. The delay was because people were jumping the queue by paying more money. It was the height of the Eighties supercar-investment boom, and some speculators weren’t using the fixed rate. Some people were paying more than £60,000 for them! The crash inevitably came in 1990, but in truth I had bought the Pantera for me, at a price I was happy with, and intended to enjoy driving it.
‘It was said at the time that it was the last right-hand-drive Pantera of the original Tom Tjaarda-styled shape to be delivered to the UK. I’ve since found out it was actually the 14th from last before the Marcello Gandini-restyled 90Si version came out. But either way, I went to Silverstone to collect it, made sure the paperwork from Italy was all present