The De Tomaso Pantera and, to a lesser extent, the Mangusta, are relatively well-known sports cars – but the story of their predecessor is perhaps less understood.
Alejandro (often spelled in the Italian way as Alessandro) de Tomaso (1928-2003) was an Argentine racing driver and businessman. His paternal grandfather had emigrated from Italy and the family had some political importance. In 1955, De Tomaso was implicated in a plot to overthrow the Argentine president Juan Perón and fled to Italy. He settled in Modena and married American heiress Isabelle Haskell. He raced in two Formula 1 Grands Prix, in 1957 in Argentina in Ferrari Tipo 500 and in 1959 in the USA in an OSCA-powered Cooper T43. He scored no championship points.
In 1959 De Tomaso founded the car company De Tomaso Automobili Spa to build prototypes and racing cars, including a Formula One car for Frank Williams’s team in 1970. In 1963 he decided to move into roadgoing sports-car manufacture. One of the technical trademarks of his cars was the use of aluminium backbone chassis.
The Vallelunga, the model in our Snapshot, was his first road car, designed in 1963 and produced from 1964 to 1967. The prototype had a backbone chassis with the engine as a stressed member and the suspension very similar to that of a racing car. It had a barchetta open body. The Vallelunga name was derived from the Autodromo di Vallelunga racing circuit north of Rome. De Tomaso showed the prototype at the Turin Auto Show in 1963. He wanted to sell the concept to another company but there were no takers – so he commissioned Carrozzeria Fissore to build a new aluminium coupé body, designed by Franco Maina, on his chassis. Exhibited at the Turin show in 1964, as many as 15 were made. In 1965 production moved to Ghia, where 50 were assembled with fibreglass bodies based on Maina’s design.
The production car was powered by a 1.5-litre straight-4 Ford Kent engine from the Cortina, tuned with twin Weber carburettors to give 104bhp. The Vallelunga was all about lightness. It was as light as a Lotus Elan but had the engine mounted amidships for better balance. The basic design was sound: the Vallelunga’s successor was the Mangusta of 1966 with a coupé body designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, but it still used an extensively re-engineered Vallelunga chassis to take a Ford 302 cubic-inch engine.
Whereas the Vallelunga name had an unexceptional logic to its origin, the Mangusta name, Italian for mongoose, is rumoured to have been used in relation to a failed deal between De Tomaso and Carroll Shelby – because mongooses can kill cobras.
Image displayed with the kind permission of the Haynes Motor Museum
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