Desirable De Tomasos

For a few years in the early 1970s, you could walk into an ordinary Lincoln-Mercury dealership in America and drive home an Italian mid-engine supercar, parked right alongside the family saloons.

An Exotic With a Practical Streak

Few supercar makers combined Italian design drama with mainstream American engineering quite this deliberately. Argentine racing driver Alejandro de Tomaso founded his company in Modena in 1959, and by 1971 had struck a genuinely unusual deal with Ford: the Pantera, wearing a Ghia-designed wedge body and running a Ford Cleveland V8, was sold across America through ordinary Lincoln-Mercury showrooms rather than a specialist exotic car network. That arrangement meant an owner could take it to a regular Ford dealer for parts and mechanical work, something genuinely unthinkable with a contemporary Ferrari or Lamborghini.

The partnership only lasted a few years before Ford pulled out, but De Tomaso kept building the Pantera in smaller numbers well into the 1990s, with over 7,000 produced across its full run — a genuinely long production life for such a small, independent manufacturer. Below is the model we've covered so far.

• De Tomaso Pantera Overview — Classic Icon