DeTomaso Mangusta, A Critical Look Part I

On paper, particularly when you consider that it made its debut in 1966, it seems like a magnificent achievement—it’s mid-engined, it’s low to the ground, it is low in height (42” high) , and is a very clean design.

Actually, and ironically, the body shape was penned by Giorgetto Giugiaro more as a whim—Ghia was doing the Iso Fidia four door sedan at the time and Ing. Bizzarrini, at the time working for Iso, thought it would be a good idea to have a sports car with some of the same design features for rich people to mark alongside their Fidia. Sort of a “his and hers” combo. So a mid-engined Iso was drawn up and a body shell built. But when it was shown to Renzo Rivolta, the owner of Iso, he rejected the idea outright (probably knowing that the only available transaxle would cost a bunch more than a transmission for a front engined car) and Ghia coachbuilders was stuck with a body design they didn’t know what to do with.

Enter the arch-villain/savior (he gets called a “villain” much more than “savior,” alas) Alejandro DeTomaso, an Argentinean building cars in Modena with his American wife, Isabelle Haskell. In the 1950s the dynamic duo were de facto OSCA employees, racing OSCAs and buying and selling them. But Alejandro wanted to go mid-engined, and the Maserati brothers, who owned OSCA, weren’t so convinced. They parted ways and DeTomaso and his American wife started their own firm in 1959 in a converted pig barn (there’s some symbolism there that escapes me…). (See note 1)

In 1963, after making a number of mid-engined race cars, DeTomaso Automobili came out with a production four cylinder midi coupe called the Vallelunga, named after a racetrack where a prototype of theirs had encountered some success. Alejandro, it turned out, was crazy about the spine frame. He had seen it on a German prewar car, the Rumpler, and decided it was the way to go. The car was cute enough, sort of a baby Ferrari 250LM in styling, but not nearly fast enough with its slightly hotted-up British Cortina engine.

The first three were alloy-bodied by Fissore but the remaining 50 or so were fiberglass bodied by Ghia.

Around 1965, DeTomaso had also been doing a project with race driver Carroll Shelby, a sort of Can Am car powered by a hyped up 289 V8 (which DeTomaso claimed produced 500 bhp, which would have been a surprise to Shelby, who had seen them grenade at 390 hp.!) But Shelby at some point yanked the funding on his part, because Ford wanted him to build more Daytona coupes for the Cobra racing program. So DeTomaso was left with a beautiful spine chassis but no money to develop it into a race car.

So there was DeTomaso, who had bought the aging Carrozzeria Ghia with his wife’s family’s funds, with a body that no one wanted. (See note 2)

Since the 70P car was defunded by Shelby, DeTomaso said he owned it. He thought about what to do with it and decided to mate the Guigiaro-designed street car body on the mid-engined 70P spine chassis developed from the Vallelunga. That became the Mangusta. He named it the “Mangusta” precisely to pique Shelby because, in nature, the natural enemy of the cobra snake is the mongoose, i.e. mangusta. Also now today the name of an Italian helicopter and a huge superyacht.

DeTomaso had only planned on the Mangusta being a promotion item for his shop, it even being called the Ghia 5000 in the lettering on the tail, but those customers with checkbooks in hand were not to be ignored. He started production of the Mangusta body shells, most likely on a chassis made elsewhere.

Though DeTomaso was going full speed ahead on the Mangusta, there was a fly in the ointment—the car failed to meet a myriad of new design laws in the USA (headlamps too low, toggle switches on the dash, no crash protection, etc) but DeTomaso’s in-laws were what you call “connected” with American legislators. (We would say “in bed with” but don’t want to risk mis-interpretation through double entendres) DeTomaso squeaked the Mangusta through for U.S. sale by having it exempted as a low volume car, of which less than 500 would be made and only through 1969 in its original form. The idea was to sell the non-conforming cars and then update the model to meet the laws in 1970. And that’s what they did, the 1970 Mangustas having pop-up headlamps and rocker switches on the dash among other up-dates. (On the cars with two headlamps when the headlamps weren’t flipped upright, they looked odd, and droopy which is why some prefer the four headlamp cars. Giugiaro used a similar flip-up headlamp design on the prototype street Iso Grifo and later long-nose Iso Grifo production cars.) If you see an early Goose it usually bears a little silver ten cent stick-on label that says that it is exempted from a whole raft of U.S. regulations. They might have just as well stamped it “politically protected” or “We know someone in Washington D.C.”

You would expect a prototype to be test driven hundreds of thousands of miles while being developed. While DeTomaso did hire accomplished race driver Jonathan Williams to do some testing, it was probably under 3000 miles and likely little Williams said was to have any effect. The Mangustas were in essence, hand made, each car a little different.

Now comes in a wrinkle: a woulda, gooda, shoulda. The head designer at Ford, one sharp eyed martinet named Eugene Bordinat, took a fancy to the ‘Goose and ordered one. Ford even had it painted yellow and displayed at the New York Auto Show. If you were there, and inquired, you got a brochure advising you to make further inquiries of Mr. Carroll Shelby, yes, the same ex-chicken pluckin’ Texan that DeTomaso was making fun of (the auto biz makes for strange bedfellows….).

But when a Ford engineering and design team were sent to inspect the cars being made on the assembly line at Ghia they came back shaking their heads that such a modern looking car was in fact built crudely, along the order of Cobra bodies which Shelby always said “were knocked out by winos under a bridge.” The Ford minions raised DeTomaso’s hopes, then dashed them. But ironically, in the manner of a true salesman, DeTomaso collared the executives before they left and showed them five wooden scale models of a new car, the DeTomaso 351. This one, he explained, would be unitized. No more spine frame. Furthermore, it would be made on an assembly line, just like in Dearborn. No more hand made body panels, etc. Plus he had this assembly line in hand in another coachbuilder he had added to his portfolio, Vignale. They were a company with a rich and storied history, and had last been building the Maserati Indy.

Timing in the car business is everything. DeTomaso, a LeMans racing veteran, had observed the seduction of Henry Ford II, grandson of the first Henry Ford, into the world of Italian cars. Henry Ford II was in fact going through sort of an “Italian period” at the time. Even though the Ford GTs had vanquished the Ferraris at LeMans not once but several times, he still hankered for a Ford to be made in Italy. An exotic Ford, one that people would look at and think: “Is that the latest Ferrari?”

So it was that he had issued orders to his minions to come back from Italy with an Italian car. So even though not a single Pantera had been built, and there was no prototype to drive, they bought the Pantera before they left town.

Note 1
He bought Ghia from Leonidas Rhadamés, the young son of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. It is said that young Trujillo was in jail at the time so most amenable to any cash offers. You might think the son of a dictator would have some political clout but it is said a CIA-paid for bullet put that clout to an end in 1961.

Note 2
DeTomaso happened, by accident or design, to marry into a monied family bulging with entrepreneurial zeal. The wife’s father once started a horse racing track, Monmouth Park and was a GM VP. They got married in Palm Beach, always a sign that you’re in the money. At first the Haskell family kept DeTomaso away from the family coffers but eventually they couldn’t resist getting into the car business, their money coming in at about the time of the Mangusta program.

Next week, Part II.