FORDS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN…
Looking at faster Fords that never made it to the showroom, this month we discover Ford nearly fitted the De Tomaso Pantera with an Essex V6!
This was probably the daftest Ford ‘might-have-been’ of the 1970s, and tells us much of the crazy ambition that AVO (the Advanced Vehicle Organisation) developed before the ‘Energy crisis’ erupted at the end of 1973. Seriously – yes, seriously – AVO once proposed to put a much-modified De Tomaso Pantera into production at South Ockendon !
Since the Pantera (the word means ‘Panther’, in Italian …) was already in production, assembled by De Tomaso in Modena, Italy, there had to be some slim link of logic to this project. It was that an Argentinian-born entrepreneur named Alejandro De Tomaso had somehow collected a handful of well-known Italian car-making names, which included Ghia, Maserati and Innocenti. Then, in 1969 he sold out both Ghia and the De Tomaso brand to Ford-USA, who therefore inherited a new mid-engined ‘super car’ called the Pantera, which was powered by a 5.7-litre Ford-USA ‘Cleveland’ V8 engine, allied to the same five-speed gearbox/rear axle unit as was used in Ford GT40s. At Ghia, this car had been styled by Tom Tjaarda, and was meant to be a direct competitor to the latest products from Ferrari and Maserati.
Ford-USA (who must have lost their commercial sanity at this time) had big ideas, paid Vignale of Turin to start building body/chassis units, and firmly expected to sell many hundreds of Panteras in the USA, where the car went on sale in 1971.
This is where Ford’s AVO division got involved, and here we can do no better than to quote Stuart Turner’s words from his autobiography Twice Lucky. Appointed manager of AVO in 1972, and briefed to expand the business:
“I believed (still do in fact) that the original Pantera was one of the truly classic car styles, and during the period when Ford were involved with De Tomaso, I put for a proposal to build a handful of cars a month in Essex. Visiting the De Tomaso factory in Italy and having to halt meetings while workers marched through, rattling tin cans as a gesture during wage negotiations, at least made a Latin change from British labour relations.”
Turner continues: “We had allocated bays, and the Panteras were going to be hand-built on axle stands – but with turbocharged Essex 3.0-litre V6 engines instead of the big American V8. Sacrilege? It didn’t seem so at the time and the V6 prototype we built went fairly well. It all looked very seductive, and we convinced everyone in top management except Harold ‘Red’ Poling – the European finance VicePresident, who would go on to be the head of Ford worldwide.”
The description of the turbocharged Essex V6 will figure strongly in the description of several cars which will appear in this series, and all started with work originally carried out by the Midlands-based Broadspeed tuning concern, though Ford’s own engineers would then work on it for future use as AVO developed.
Perhaps it was as well that this project died, not only because of Poling’s resistance, but because of the onset of the Energy Crisis. After all, with AVO already suffering from a lack of orders for cars like the Escort Mexico and the RS2000, where was the common sense of pushing on with a handbuilt ‘supercar’ which would have been one of the most expensive cars on the European market? Looking back, it was easy to see the flaws in the entire Pantera project, particularly the British offshoot. Not only was there the transportation problem – body shells built in northern Italy, final assembly well over 200 miles away, Cleveland engines produced in Ohio, then flown thousands of miles to Italy, ZF transmissions from Germany and (if the AVO proposal had gone ahead) shipment of cars to Essex, followed by a near-complete rebuild before delivery – but the fact is that the cars were always seriously under-developed and unreliable. In Europe at this time, Ford always seemed to be unlucky with its promotion of limited-production ‘supercars’, two-seaters or truly specialist machines. But did it ever make sense for AVO to consider producing a much-modified Pantera, which would have been a 140mph machine costing at least four times that of – say – a 3.0-litre Capri ?
NO.4 FORD-UK DE TOMASO PANTERA