From the August 1984 issue of Car and Driver.
This here ain't no Little Bo-Peep car. It's no breathless blue-blood bunny banger for tripping ever so daintily down the lane. This is a car for kicking ass. It makes you feel tough. It makes you drive tough. It makes you look tough in the eyes of the world. And if you can drive it well when calling on its prodigious speed, you are tough. This is the Pantera's second chance. First imported by Lincoln-Mercury from 1971 through 1974, it has never had trouble generating excitement. Heck, its original price was less than $10,000, a perfect plateau for less-than-rich Pretty People.
Despite the flood of inflation that's washed briskly under the bridge in the interim, today's $55,000 price tag (ouch!) may fall on your brain like a brick on your foot. Luckily, the bricklike application of your foot to the Pantera's throttle is substantial recompense. If you want flash to dance with, the Pantera GT5 is one of the hottest (and sure to remain one of the rarest) hoofers in town.
But is it practical? Is it back for real, or is it just flashing in the pan? The Pantera is no longer Lincoln-Mercury's game. Even though the original was eyeball exotic and built by genuine Eye-talians (with a little help from a displaced Argentine), one could supposedly wheel it over to the local L-M service department. Those days are gone. Oh, the V-8 engine is still the basic tried-and-true 5.8-liter Dearborn design, so a Dearborn-oriented dealer shouldn't fall over in a dead faint if you point him nose first into the Pantera's engine bay . . . but what about the rest of the car? Well, sir, if the GT5's hydraulic hamma-framma or its asymmetrical assimilator suddenly gets a case of terminal palpitations today, you've got George Stauffer to hold your hand.
George is 1984's Pantera distributor, headquartered in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. Wisconsin?! Shouldn't he be in the dairy business or something? Well, he is. George is big in cheese. Very big. Back in 1880, the Swiss family Stauffer moved to Hungary and went into the cheese business, never wavering until 1943, when the Russians swallowed Hungary, cheese and all. Still Swiss citizens, the Stauffers picked up three-year-old George and all the churners they could carry and headed for home. Six years later, they packed up again, this time for Wisconsin. George eventually took over the family cheesing, and although the business was sold to an Austrian co-op in 1982, he remains manager.
Through the years he collected a variety of exotic Fords: a championship-winning 427 Cobra, the 1965 Cobra Daytona coupe driven at Le Mans by Dan Gurney, the GT40 that won Le Mans in 1966, and the Mk 4 that Mario Andretti won Sebring with in 1967. Stauffer says he's got a dealer's license in Fort Lauderdale and a shop in London that turns Rolls-Royce Silver Clouds into convertibles. He also owns Stauffer Classics, Ltd., a Cobra- and Pantera-oriented sales-and-service outfit in Blue Mounds. Ford-powered cars are his hobby, but as hobbies go, the Pantera GT5 is a major interest.
Today's Panteras are actually trickled into the country by the Exotic Car Store of Atlanta and Miami. Here comes complication.
"The way it stands," says Mr. Stauffer of Wisconsin, "the car is sold by the De Tomaso factory in Italy to a distributor in Belgium, then he has an agreement with the Exotic Car Store that he will sell only to them in the States, and they have an agreement with me that they will not sell Panteras to anybody other than myself. De Tomaso, I'm told secondhand, does not want any official part of bringing cars into this country. I really won't know why until I get over there."
One likely reason is that the factory is building only about 50 Panteras per year (Stauffer says he's laid claim to the next 25 off the line), and Alejandro de Tomaso isn't interested in going to the trouble of adapting them to our current regulations.
So now George Stauffer is discovering that he's got his hobby cut out for him.
"This GT5," he says dubiously, "is supposedly DOT'd. Now, until I find out exactly what the factory is doing and what the actual requirements are, I can assume it is DOT'd. But the engine is not EPA'd."
We have obviously come in very early in the power curve here. The whole Pantera situation is still very much in the air, so take our assessments and our test results with basketball-sized grains of salt.
The original Pantera was known for good looks, strong performance, reasonable price, miserable seats, perpetual overheating, insidious rust, underengineered wheel bearings, lily-livered U-joints, bad steering and suspension geometry, etc., etc. The new Pantera retains the wild looks and the big performance. The seats are somewhat better, and the overheating is gone, as far as we can determine. Stauffer claims the other major complaints have been cured. Time will tell.
