He studied journalism in college, but this got him embroiled in politics. Meanwhile he discovered auto racing. One of his first race cars was a four cylinder Bugatti. He also drove a supercharged prewar Alfa in some local events. In 1954, he was second in the 1000 Km of Buenos aires, driving a Maserati.
Though his career as a race driver was improving, his political ramblings in print eventually got him into trouble with Juan Peron, the dictator who ran Argentina with an iron hand (while his lovely wife Evita looted the treasury). DeTomaso fled to Italy one step ahead of Peron's enforcers in 1955, ending up working with the Maserati brothers near Bologna. The brothers had sold the firm that bears their name before WWII but in the '50's were running a new firm they had formed called OSCA that made mostly small displacement sports cars.
DeTomaso was a little too radical for them and ran afoul of their plans when he put an OSCA engine into a mid-engined car when they were only pushing front-engined cars.
Marries Rich
He left in 1959 to start his own company. Although he had married the fabulously rich American race driver, Isabelle Haskell, in 1957, they started their company on a shoestring, determined to make it on their own. Their first race car was a F�rmula Junior. These FJ's used low-cost mildly tuned street engines, but within two years the DeTomasos were brazen enough to try to field a F�rmula One car.
Unfortunately, though DeTomaso created dozens of experimental cars during this era, hardly a one won a race. But they were all marvels of the use of cast alloys and spine frames, two of his passions. He even experimented with titanium some 30 years before other race cars used the lightweight metal.
In 1962, he introduced a F1 with an engine from a Ford 1.5 liter Cortina. His driver was Franco Bernabei.The car was entered in the GP of Rome but didn't make it into the race because of a carburetion problem. Next was an Indy-type car, using a Ford V8 as part of the load bearing structure, in competition with the Lotus Ford that soon won Indy. The DeTomaso car weighed a mere 669 kg, but never made it to Indy. It is rumored to have been used by Texan John Mecom as a flower box, which is some indication of what he thought of DeTomaso cars.
Sreet Cars
About 1962 DeTomaso got his start in production street cars. He created a mid-engined race car called the Vallelunga, named after a track near Rome. His 549 Kg aluminum-bodied Ford Cortina-powered car put out 100 hp., and would reach 209 km/h.
He contracted with Fissore, a coachbuilder, to build production Vallelungas, which were all coupes. But after only three were built in aluminum, he had a falling out with Fissore and he went with Ghia, a rival coachbulder, to build the rest of the 52 Vallelungas that were made, these all in fiberglass.
The Mangusta
But the car that really put DeTomaso Automobili on the map was the Mangusta ("Mongoose"). This was a car that resulted from a botched business deal with American racer Carroll Shelby. Shelby had hired DeTomaso to build a group 5 mid-engined race car using a 289 "cobra-ized" V8 but when Shelby cut off funds for the car, DeTomaso used the spine frame he had designed (an up-sizing of the Vallelunga frame) for a body designed at Ghia by Giorgetto Giugiaro for the Iso company but rejected. The show car was named the "Mangusta" because in the world of nature, the natural enemy of the cobra is the mongoose. The European Mangustas got a 289 cu. in. V8 while in America they got the weak 302 Windsor V8 from Ford. About this time his in-laws, who owned many business entities including shrimp fishing fleets and baseball bat factories, chipped in with some cash and DeTomaso was able to buy Ghia plus a car factory owned by Vignale. He was ready to mass produce cars for the American market.
British Motor Car Distributors Ltd, owned by Norwegian immigrant Kjell Qvale distributed the Mangusta in the U.S., selling about 400 units between 1969 and 1970.
The Pantera is Born
Ford Motor company liked the Manguysta's aggressive styling and sent a team to Italy with an eye toward importing it just as they previously had imported the Cobra through Shelby. But they found the Mangusta was built with such crude hand methods that it was unbuildable in quantity.
Before the Ford representatives left, DeTomaso showed them the scale model of a design for his next car, a unitized body car called the DeTomaso 351, again using a Ford V8. This was designed by American Tom Tjaarda, who had first come to Italy in 1959 and who succeeded Giugiaro as head designer at Ghia.
Ford bought the Pantera, as they called it, before the first one was built, figuring since it was unitized, it could be series-built on an assembly line. For an engine, they chose the current hot Mustang engine at the time, the 351 cu. in. "Cleveland" V8 as its powerplant, rated at 330 hp. in Italy. Lincoln-Mercury distributed the Pantera in the U.S. from 1971-'74. Just over 6,000 were imported, a far cry from the 10,000 they had talked about bringing in.
The Longchamps
After the Pantera was in production, DeTomaso asked Tjaarda to do a Mercedes 350SLC type coupe, which he did, called the Longchamps. And a Jaguar XJ6 type imitator, called the Deauville. Neither car sold more than a few hundred, but Ford was momentarily intrigued with the idea of bringing in
the Deauville.
But Ford and DeTomaso had a big falling out over the myriad of quality control problems in the Pantera, and Ford wearied of having to fix the electricals, frame, paint, gauges, gearboxes, etc. etc. They had never been through an ordeal like this before, where the car arrived in America so unsatisfactorily prepared by its builder.
Ford stopped importing the Pantera in 1974 but DeTomaso kept making Panteras almost up to the year 2000 with just minor up-dates and selling them in Europe, Australia and Asia.
The Guara
DeTomaso owned Maserati briefly, having been loaned the money by the Italian government to buy it,the Italians figuring that it was too good a company to lose to the sands of history. While he was owner, a new mid-engined car, the Chubasco, was designed with a central spine type chassis. When DeTomaso sold Maserati, he took that frame design over to DeTomaso Modena and had a new body designed and that became the Guara. A California firm tried to import them but only a couple have succeeded in getting into the U.S.
The Second Qvale Era
In the late '90's DeTomaso designed a new front-engined car, the Bigua, using a Ford "Cobra" 4-cam V8 and this car attracted the attention of Kjell Qvale, )[pronounced "Cue-Volley") the same man who had imported the racy Mangusta in 1960's. Qvale went whole hog for the Bigua, renaming in the "Mangusta" and setting up a factory at his own expense in Italy to produce it. But then there was a falling out with DeTomaso over changes needed for the car, and the two partners parted for the second time, with the result that Qvale was stuck with a car without the luser of the DeTomaso heritage to sell it so he re-named it the "Qvale Mangusta." A few hundred were imported. Now MG has bought the car and already designed a new body for it and changed the name. DeTomaso has restyled the Guara a couple of times so that now he offers coupe and spyder versions. His firm has unveiled a new Pantera body in a show car form but no one knows when they will put it into production or if history will repeat itself and Ford import it.
Sole Survivor
Alejandro DeTomaso has outlasted almsot all his former rivals, Enzo Ferrari and Ferucio Lamborghini being the most famous, but also including Renzo Rivolta (Iso cars), Peter Monteverdi (Monteverdi cars). DeTomaso is alive, but not exactly well since suffering a stroke a few years ago. He cannot talk and has to use gestures to communicate with his aides. His son from his first wife, Santiago, holds a key position at the plant but has not been granted permission to take over from the old man, being in roughly the same situation as Piero Lardi Ferrari was when his father was still alive. And so it is. Ferrari and Maserati, the other two Modena-based supercar makers, are both owned by Fiat now but DeTomaso is still an independent firm brimming over with ideas. Ford Motor Company recently gobbled up cash, they might be looking for another boutique automaker to add to their premium offerings. It's still a possibility that, for the third time, the DeTomaso blue and white emblem could return to these shores....
Wallace A.Wyss is the author of "DeTomaso:the Man and the Machines," available from Pantera International, a club with their own website.