Qvale’s Mangusta

But his two top engineers, Dallara and Bizzarrini, did like mid-engined cars and hoped they would talk Renzo into it once he was knocked over by its beauty. It used styling elements from the Iso Fidia, a four seat, front-engined car that Giugiaro had already designed. But Rivolta said “no” in a way they could understand and Alejandro de Tomaso, at the time owner of Ghia Carrozzeria, picked up the design himself to use as a Ghia show car. He put it on a backbone chassis he had designed for a race car he was building with Carroll Shelby until Der Snakemeister dropped out of the project.

The result was the mid-engined Mangusta, which soon went into production. While the 302-cu. in. Ford powered version that came to the US was anemic compared to the car’s potent looks, the car is still revered for its purity of design. Few production cars look so much like the prototype.

Flash forwards a few decades to 1996. De Tomaso rolls out the Bigua prototype, a front-engined car using more than a little Ford Mustang input including the engine and transmission. The chassis was a box section steel chassis and the suspension independent all the way around.

The designer credited is Marcello Gandini, famous in Italy for doing the Miura (although Giugiaro hints he designed that at Bertone) the Countach, and many other Lamborghinis.
It is a blunt car, somewhat reminiscent in general shape of the Trumph TR7/TR8 and its only claim to uniqueness is a unique top that rolls up out of a well, similar to the top in a roll top desk.

The engine was a 4.6 liter Ford V8 a quad cam version also used in the Mustang Cobra. It was a lot more powerful, at 320 hp than the 230-hp the 302 used in the original mid-engined US spec Mangusta. (Another source lists the Ford 4-cam as having only 305 hp.) The Mustang engine had 314 ft-lbs. of torque. Transmission choices were a Borg Warner 5-speed manual or a computer controlled 4-speed automatic. Gas mileage was 17 mpg in the city and as high as 28 mpg on the highway.

de Tomaso was showing it around when who should call but Kjell Qvale (pronounced SHELL QUE-VOLLEY) a Norwegian who had built an import car empire in San Francisco. You might call him the “King of Van Ness Avenue,” San Francisco’s new car row. It was Qvale who, back around 1968, had bankrolled production of 280 Mangustas the first time around, selling that number in the US. He established the De Tomaso marque enough for Ford to take notice and soon after Ford tied the deal with De Tomaso to import the Pantera, leaving Qvale, his first US importer, out in the cold.

Qvale arrived in the U.S at age 10 in 1929. He was later to see service in his adopted country as a Navy pilot and soon after the war was importing Jaguars later Rolls, Bentley and a number of other expensive imports. He formed British Motors in 1947 and made a lot of money and to top it off, he was one of the first Volkswagen dealers.

Flash forward again. Qvale saw the De Tomaso Bigua as a car whose costs he could control, reasoning that it had an off-the-shelf Mustang V8. Of course his first move was to rename it the Mangusta in honor of the late, great mid-engined DeTomaso of the sixties, which was a pretty smart move. With his sons and De Tomaso, they formed a new company and opened a new factory in Italy to build the car.

Almost immediately the deal fell apart.

In the year 2000, according to Chris Gable, a writer for a website called Drive.com, the two companies split apart and the car was renamed the Qvale Mangusta. Qvale told this author that de Tomaso was impossible to work with, reminiscent of the time that Ford tried to get him to straighten out flaws in the Pantera only to find out that, once he had an investor, he felt no responsibility for gliches in the resultant product. De Tomaso was always off to the next project.

The Qvale Mangusta had one unique styling feature called the “Rototop,” actually a three-position roof that converted the car from coupe to targa to roadster. Qvale put one of his sons, Bruce Qvale, president and CEO of the Qvale Automotive Group, in charge of the newly named car and the agreement with deTomaso was scrapped.

The original licensing agreement gave Qvale the global rights to manufacture, distribute, and retail the new Mangusta and all future DeTomaso-branded vehicles … except, according to writer Gable, “in Italy and the UK. Once DeTomaso was out of the picture, Qvale could go after those markets.”

Manufacturing cars as well as selling them was not a new idea to Qvale. In the past the company was making Jensens in England including the ill-fated Jenson Healey and more successfully, the Interceptor III and distributing such brands as the VW Beetle, Porsche, Audi and Maserati in the US. Overall, the Qvale company has moved more than a million cars out the door of American showrooms. All this from a hunch Qvale had after the war, figuring that Americans wanted something stylish instead of the blundering cars Detroit was making. He also funded race teams, even running at Indy with drivers the calibre of A.J. Foyt and Bobby Unser.

But it was with new cars that his money was made. He thought he knew about producing them, as a result of so many years of selling them. As is usual with new cars, once the manufacturing costs are discovered, the price of the car rises to try to keep ahead of that and the Qvale Mangusta was priced at $78,500.

Ford got a little too deep into it, with their Visteon parts division doing the interiors. Visteon later went broke so you wonder if they invested too much in their bid to become a supplier to importers?

The car was a hot performer with a 0-60 mph time of a tad over 6 seconds and a top speed of near 155 mph. Although production was pegged at 500 a year, it turned out to be a lot less and, alas, only a few hundred cars were made, even if you count the original ones branded as DeTomaso. According to one source, “between 2000 and 2002, Qvale built 270 cars (or 272, depending on which source is to be believed), the majority of which were exported to the USA.”

Why was it a failure? Well, first of all it was false advertising in a way, calling it a Mangusta when the original Mangusta was mid-engined. Secondly its styling was Gandini’s worst, not one of Giugiaro’s best. Third, the interior was a little too Detroit-looking to be passed off as hand-made-in-Italy. And the price, well, let’s say it was a smidgen too close to a car like the 500SL that, in terms of quality, was streets ahead. Then, the problem of the name change altered the public’s perception of the car. As a Detomaso marque car it can be shown at concours alongside the original Mangusta, the Vallelunga, the Deauville, the Longhamp, and the Guara, but as a Qvale it’s well…almost thought of as a pretender, a wanna-be, to the bloodline of DeTomaso.

It’s difficult to say now that a decade has passed whether the ones labeled “DeTomaso” are worth more than the ones labeled “Qvale.” We suspect that but, in terms of reliability, one has to expect that the later each car was built, the more chances there were to sort out engineering flaws compared to the early ones badged as DeTomasos.

Qvale, a pragmatic sort, dumped the whole thing on Rover, who produced a very odd looking coupe from the leftovers called the MG SV (Project X80). It was faster but reeked of the Japanese origami School of Styling with a little Transformer thrown in.
Qvale told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview in 2008 that he lost $28 million making 284 Mangustas.

But no matter. We are talking World Class entrepreneur here. Qvale was always a gambler, for instance, way back in 1963 he bought a horse called Silky Sullivan after he retired from racing and put him into stud, building a thoroughbred horse racing empire. Sometimes he would pay more than a million for a horse only to have it end its riding career within days.

Hey, you win some, you lose some, but the Qvale Bigua, that one hurt