My Summer Vacation: Pebble Beach 2012

by Wallace Wyss

 

 Your author, left, Henry Ford III at right. I believe he and his
brother both own  Shelby Mustangs where their father had once
 owned a GT40 and a Cobra.
 

My Friend,

   Monterey 2012 was everything I hoped it would be.  I got to see over 40 real genuine certified Cobras on the grid, photographed the vintage race, and sold some artwork. Plus ate a fine meal at Clint Eastwood's little ol' restaurant.  Let me tell it all in chronological order: I selected a big ol’Chrysler 300 for the trip, and arrived in my secret low cost no-tell motel –far from the actual Monterey peninsula--in five hours.  On Wednesday I set off for the Embassy Suites and set up my booth at Automobilia, a sort of emporium for the flora and fauna of the automotive world– posters, model cars, clothes, old books (and new books). I was pleased to be in a booth next to Mike Rabin who is famous for making wheel discs He had a great sense of humor, especially considering he had to endure hearing my sales pitch at least 100 times. Finally he got to where he would interrupt my pitch to a new client, saying “It’s getting deeper.”

 

     I actually met a repeat buyer, so I know my art’s catching on…alas I didn’t have the new copies of SHELBY The Man, The Cars, the Legend as the second edition was on the press.  I wondered over to Logan Gray’s booth and was shocked to see George Stauffer’s book Daytona Cobra Coupe is now $1500 used. I wonder if ol’ George has a warehouse full of new copies stashed away! I was tempted to buy a book about Lloyd Ruby whose name I understand, he insisted on pronouncing L-A-W-D ROO-BEE but found that book  too late to include any gems about him in my update of my Shelby book (SHELBY The Man, the Cars, the Legend)  as the second edition was on the press that week.

I also met a lady dressed in sort of ‘50s attire, reminiscent of the late great Betty Page (the first postwar glamor girl), selling scarves and such and we talked about how rat rods and ‘50s hot rod culture was always there behind the scenes, but only recently has attracted a following and even has conventions in Las Vegas.  I also sold my two leather jackets, one that was embroidered “COBRA RANCH Mendocino” and the other plugging my Ferrari novel (“Ferrari Hunters”). One had fur on it and we were lucky to escape the wrath of the PETAistas.

 

     Off to a wingding at the Monterey airport and, seeing as we love aero planes, we went over there and sampled the wine and ogled the glamour girls, and I ran into Mr. Pagani and chatted about this and that until I realized he spoke no English. There were a few Navy men in dress uniform and I was happy to see military guests at these events (I remember back when Steve Earle would host the Army to send over soldiers from Ft. Ord to watch his vintage races).

 

There isn't a better view in the concours world than the bay
 behind Pebble Beach Lodge. The owner of the drag racing Cobra
also received one of our exclusive COBRA RANCH jeans shirts.

    First sign this writer has seen of burgeoning Fiat 500 mania--one tricked out with mags and striping. This proud owner has a business in Signal Hill, CA, trying to meet demand for the Italian challenge to the MINI.

     Thenceforth on the following Friday morn we proceeded to the Concours Italiano which had plenty of delights, including a couple unrestored cars—gotta love those rolling barn finds– and a couple of hand-built cars that show incremental improvement from year to year. It was great when concours events finally allowed barn find cars in, because the truth is that some cars never do get finished. Before it was hard to find these diamonds-in-the-rough whereas now you even find them at major auctions like the Gooding (they had a tatty patina-encrusted Alfa).  Now there might be those who say 'I pay umpteen dollars to go see a concours and I see old rusty cars...'but you don't understand, a barn find is like catnip to a cat.  Also a brilliant move by Concorso, which has to strive especially hard to combat the Quail event now held on the same day, was a display of Italian bicycles and, though not a bike rider myself (I never got that Schwinn Phantom…) I thought this was the ultimate for bike fans and general spectators because there were probably many brands never seen in the U.S.

 

     At the Quail, an Iso Grifo targa was one of several Iso Grifos honored because it was the 50th anniversary of the "Iso" marque.  Iso was a company that stuck with Chevy V8s until GM cut them off, so the last ones had 351 Clevelands, like the one I owned for a whole week (until selling it in the parking lot of the Barrett-Jackson auction)

 

     Onto Laguna, the racetrack on Highway 68, and I headed straight for the Shelby group, who were happy as pigs in mud for being the honored marque. There were dozens of real Cobras (the small blocks were CSX2000 series and big blocks CSX3000 series) and it was great to see some still more or less the way they were 45 to 50 years ago, though one ugly one looked like it was painted with a trowel and I overheard someone berate that owner, telling him, “Your car is lowering the value of all Cobras.”

At Pebble Beach, Cobra owner Bruce Campena puts on a spirited

presentation on his smooth hood street 427. Judges are Lynn Park

in the Smokey the Bear hat and Pete Brock, both long time Cobraistis.

 

     Because Dr. Ernie T. Nagamatsu races a Cobra 289 with a rare LeMans style aluminum hardtop, he qualified for my team jacket as did about five other racers . Dr. Ernie has even taken his fastback hardtop-equipped Cobra to Goodwood to race. Each racer I encountered had to try several jackets on to see which fit, so that’s why not too many “won” my participation award.(actually, that's all I had with me, or they all would have earned one).  The actual race on Saturday was intensive, one by Jim Click , a Ford car dealer who I have previously seen racing a GT40. I think Jim Farley, a Ford VP, was also in the race so it’s interesting to see a high ranked Ford executive in vintage racing.

 

     As I left the Cobra race there were some other cars of interest lining up for the following races—someone trying to race a Ferrari Lusso, and then some brass-era cars that were beautifully detailed. In the pits several teams have now gone to painting pictures on their car hauler, scenes from their cars early days of racing. The signs they post showing their car’s history are getting more elaborate—one pit even having oil paintings of the car.

 

     These guys had a whole movie backdrop behind their period racer.  There was a mid-day speech on Shelby and I recognized Pete Brock, designer of the Cobra Daytona coupe, and hot dog driver Bob Bondurant, but they were too far away for me to ask questions, so later I made up for it by talking  to Henry Ford III, a robust young lad, son of Edsel , who himself has his place in the dynasty as  son of HFII, “The Deuce.” I told HFIII that, “If you grew up in Detroit, the Ford family was our royal family.” (My father worked at the Rouge building Model As in the 1930s).

 

     Edsel told me about the role of Carroll Shelby upon his return to the Ford fold. “He was over 80 when he came back,” he said. He also told me Shelby would personally go to the track and test the cars and scare the hell out of everybody. I took every opportunity to momentarily clutch various long-stemmed beauties hawking chemical cosmetics for cars, telling them that if I take a picture with them, the guys at the Senior Center will get a laugh. That pitch worked better before I shaved the beard.

 

Your author enjoying the ambiance of the
Lincoln hospitality suite at Pebble Beach.

     Somewhere in there we got over to Clint Eastwood’s place (not the Hog’s Breath, that’s old hat) but the Mission Inn Ranch or whatever, an old collection of farm buildings that is about 500 ft. south of the old Father Serra-founded Carmel Mission. There isn’t a more pleasant place to view the ocean than at Clint’s place, which is remarkably free of any reminder whatsoever that you are in a movie star’s place.  The next goal was to secure visiting privileges to a hospitality suite at Pebble Beach on Sunday. “Hey, you got a press pass, remember?” Well, it is at Pebble you find out that being the member of the press is only slightly more important, and maybe less so, than the person making your cappuccino. Each suite has a beady-eyed person with “The List”. And if you aren’t on it, you’d best be adaptive. I dropped some names until one rang the right bell and thus was in. The sun came out briefly and for one glorious 15-minutes it was “How can life be better than wining and dining at Pebble whilst the best cars in the world are paraded before you?”

 

     Then, braced with food and drink, it was off into the trenches, first visiting the A.C. owners, who proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the 260 Cobra was but a slight modification of the A.C. 2.6 Zephyr –of which they had at least two on display. Then  it was on to the Cobras themselves, including ol’ CSX2000 (the very first Cobra) whose leather hide looked appropriately trashed for a 50-year old car.

 

     The Cobra class winner at Pebble was Steve Volk who backed the Shelby American Collection museum in Colorado. Each owner had a scrapbook on his car and I could see some owners really pitching to have their car chosen but with judges like Lynn Park and Pete Brock, you couldn’t slip anything by these judges!     Pebble is always an education even for those jaded journalists who think they know of every car. For instance, I saw a Ghia-bodied Chrysler of early ‘50s vintage, nice in the details but looking like they thought of dual headlamps late in the game, jamming them on.

     Of course you can talk about this famous Italian designer and that one, but me being from the Midwest, the only designers I knew about as a lad were Bill Cushenberry, Dean Jeffries and George and Sam Barris. Well, wouldn’t cha know, I ran into George Barris, as always wearing those gold Cazal wraparound sunglasses. We talked about when the car magazines were printed small so you could hide them in your school books and the teacher wouldn’t know what you were really reading.

 

     I also ran into super youthful Camilo Pardo, who, during his 18-year career as a Ford designer, designed the new Ford GT. He told me he has a studio on the west coast now so I am really curious to see his non-Ford paintings, when they emerge. The puzzler is that he still looks eighteen, so he must have started at Ford while a mere infant.  I also ran into another old name in hot rodding, Terry Cook, at both Concorso and at the Auto Retro (a memorabilia event and art show) at Pebble, the Cookster hawking a sort of ersatz Bugatti type vehicle. Cook, once editor of Hot Rod when I met him almost fifty years ago said he had an epiphany of sorts when he saw a hot rod win the Ridler award at the Detroit Autorama and heard it cost the owner over $2 million. “And yet when you look at it from a distance,” he said “it’s just another ’32 Ford.” Meanwhile he had been exposed to a pre-war classic, probably something by Figoni et Falaschi, and decided to go into the business of making classic styled hot rods. He has made several and even displayed them in Paris, where they aren’t horrified but rather love the idea.

 

     I left the Concours before The Big Crowd and the judging, though I do like to see that confetti shower conferred upon the winners for Best of Show.  Before I blew town,  I remembered to check in with the Mecum auction who had auctioned my genuine autographed picture of Der Snakemeister (Carroll Shelby) along with a giclee print on canvas of my oil portrait depicting Shelby as he looked at Sebring in ‘65, and a Cobra Ranch Mendocino jacket plus a copy of the book I co-authored on GT40 (Ford GT40 and the New Ford GT). They looked up the results and told me to expect a check for a couple hundred in the next week (which they delivered!) Unfortunately, what with five nights in the motel and the gas, and the meals that didn’t quite cover the trip (in fact only about one fourth of it) ….but it was really memorable so I don’t mind the expense. Sorry you didn’t make it but I’m here to tell ya' Monterey 2012 was a real toot….

 

capt

Yer O’bd’nt servant,
Wallace Wyss

 

 

 

 

 



 

Cougar II prototype: Opinion sampler

      What if I told you that there's a small block cobra with very low mileage that sits in a dark dungeon in Detroit, hardly ever seen by the public? And that it has a one-off body?  The car is the 1963 Cougar, which was what was called a "dream car" back then, now called "concept cars."   Ford never liked the eggshell thin body of the aluminum bodied Cobra so designed a coupe similar to the Corvette and had one made.
 

Original Cougar Concept

      It is candy-apple red and is called the Cougar II because there was an earlier Cougar dream car built by Vignale in Italy for Ford.  The Cougar II is a fastback design with a fiberglass body and a 260 High-Performance engine with 4 speed transmission.  It has an all new dashboard.  The top is covered with some kind of brushed metal ( probably aluminum) to reflect heat.  Unlike the production Cobra, it had  concealed "pop-up" headlamps and a serious, fully instrumented interior.

     Where the regular 260 street Cobra would do about 160 Ford  claimed that Cougar II was engineered to reach speeds in the 170 miles-an-hour range. When interior air pressure exceeded 15 pounds per square inch, a relief panel across the rear of the passenger compartment opened automatically.  This panel was required, since there was the possibility that at high speeds, the extreme pressure against the rear window might blow it out. Cougar also had a unique spring-loaded window-lift mechanism that allowed adjustment to the curved side windows.

     Ford said it was constructed on chassis #CSX2004) . They refer in some press releases to the high-performance 289 Ford engine being moved rearward in the chassis so odds are it had a 289 not a 260 as they say elsewhere (maybe it arrived at Ford with a 260).  Ford claims it was designed before the Stingray coupe, which is possible but the timing was close since the Stingray coupe was designed starting in about 1961 for debut as a '63 model.

     Now that Cobra roadsters are worth North of $600,000, the Museum that can't afford to restore it should turn it over to be sold as a fund raiser (we suggest Gooding auction at Monterey) and with the money they could buy ten other prototypes from Detroit automakers.  It is the same argument you would use for a horse breeder who has a potential Secretariat thoroughbred but who can't take it to the big races like the Derby, so why not sell it and buy ten more horses?

     As it is, the Cougar II and the XD Cobra (another prototype on a real Cobra chassis) only see the light of day occasionally as the Detroit Historical Museum does not have space to show them in their regular collection.  Thankfully they have brought them out for special occasions, like for an appearance at the 2011 Detroit Autorama; just enough so we know they still exist!





Comment below if you think would it be more merciful to re-body the Cougar II into a Cobra.

Ford's GR-1 Concept Model: Could it be Built Into a Cobra?

      The world of the auto collector is usually divided neatly into such categories as prototypes, mules,
and production cars. Some prototypes sometimes escape auto makers and are put on the road, but it's rare, especially now that there's emissions and safety rules which prototypes handily don't have to meet. Mules never reach the road--they are destroyed, and often don't look anything like the production car. Now we have a new category: Platform model.  We found out a year late that Ford sold the "platform model" (an inanimate non-running life size model for a future car) at an auction in Monterrey a year ago. Now that makes  us wonder if it could be put on a chassis and then
called, and presumably registered as, a Cobra?
     Presumably Ford supplied a receipt for the car and described it and with 50 States in the U.S. (plus Puerto Rico and Guam) that leaves a buyer over 50 DMV offices he can try to register it at.  The sleek GR-1 was first unveiled at the 2004 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.  The platform model sold at the RM auction a year ago for $75,000 (the money going to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) . It was built after the Cobra concept roadster won  Best in Show at the 2004 Detroit Auto Show. 

 

The design of the car, which in profile, strongly resembles the design by Pete Brock for the 1964 Cobra Daytona coupe is credited to a young designer  at the Irvine Advanced Design Studio,  George Saridakis. His Kamm-tailed homage to the original coupe caught the eye of Ford’s Head of Design, J Mays, and got approved for a show car. Though the coupe they later built in running form for a second prototype was front-engined, the running version used much of the Ford GT platform from their mid-engined car of '05-'06. Why would Ford sell a non-running car? Because they discovered in an auction several years ago where they sold dozens of clay, wood and fiberglass models that buyers of non-running cars generally put them in their vast living rooms or museums on display (or they could be Ford dealers wanting something as a "showroom magnet.") . Hardly anyone, Ford figured,  would want to go through the expense of building a chassis to put under it.  Ford figures: Hey, it's for charity and if they donate it to charity they can write it off as a charitable contribution.
     Going back to the idea of making it a running car, we think if the owner mounted this body on a real A.C. chassis, he or she would have a better argument for registering it as an "A.C. Cobra" because the chassis would be built by A.C. and the body by Ford. Then it would be in the same category as the XD Cobra, a genuine A.C. Cobra chassis rebodied by Ford back in the early '60s with an experimental body design or the Cougar II, another genuine A.C. Cobra chassis rebodied by Ford that's in the same collection.
     Now when it comes to a replica chassis, not made by A.C. (though they could use an A.C. Mk.IV through Mk. VI), then you couldn't call it an "A.C. Cobra" but you could still register it, in one state or another, as a Ford Cobra which is probably how it's described on the paperwork. And once it's titled, you could move to the State you live in and re-title it.  Now what we want to know is, what happened to the polished aluminum one that followed? That's the car we want but if that's not for sale, the present owner of the "platform car" might want to price out what it would cost to get this inanimate platform car to be a running car. But since the Concept Platform is not alloy you couldn't polish it to look like the running car. We'll take a wild guess and say $250,000 separates a running car from having a car like Ford's running GR-1 concept car...

The Origins of the Daytona Cobra coupe styling
by Wallace Wyss

A great deal has been written through the years on how distinctive and original the styling was of the Cobra Daytona coupe. And, having seen several up close, I can agree.  But any serious student of GT racing in the early ‘60s will see in the Daytona's lines other cars that preceded it and which must have influenced it, even if subliminally.

Ford GT40 and the New Ford GT

 

     I've finally got my hands on a few copies of an outstanding book (contact me if you're interested in one :). With so many amazing pictures and diagrams, it's the kind of book you'd like to own even if you couldn't read. It's hardbound, thick, heavy, and could take out a burglar should the need arise. Ford GT40 & The New Ford GT is written by Al Axelrod, Brian Winer and Wallace Wyss.  It is an in-depth read following the progrssion of Ford from the birth of the Ford GT40 to it's reincarnation as the New Ford GT.  

     When it comes to Ford GTs, there are enthusiasts and then there are super-enthusiasts.  Co-writer Brian Winer qualifies as a super-enthusiast.  The following is a candid interview regarding his experience with the car and how his 2007 book came about.

Book Review: The Shelby American Story

The Shelby American Story by Art Evans

Published by Photo Data Research, Redondo Beach,CA

128 pages, hardbound, $39.95

 

     Art Evans is the “grand old man” of sports car historians in the U.S. at least in the postwar era. He was there way back then, more than 60 years ago, as an amateur driver, and despite various careers in the military and academic circles , has never lost track of the early sports car drivers.

 Hence he was well qualified to do this hardbound book.

 It is his second on Shelby, the first covering Shelby as a race driver. He also previously did one on Ken Miles, one of the most famous Shelby drivers.  This one goes into Shelby as a carmaker but also is a paean to the many drivers who drove for Shelby, some obscure, some internationally known.

    The book is somewhat choppy in its organization, jumping from profiles of race drivers like Ken Miles and Bill Krause and then back to the cars they drove.  For instance, the section called “Bill Krause” is followed by sections called “The First Race” and “The 1962 Bahamas” This writer would have preferred there be an ongoing narrative throughout and the drivers and or cars described in “break out” boxes so you can stop and read about them or just continue with the narrative.

    Where some Shelby histories play down the Sunbeam Tiger, this author gives adequate credit to Shelby’s role in developing the car and also to Ken Miles’ lesser known role developing the same car.  Oddly Mario Andretti gets a chapter when his role for Shelby was, as far as we know, only a couple of races.  Lew Spencer is given credit as a mainstay of Shelby-American, and his dealership with Shelby is explained. Briefly, Shelby started it for him and Spencer to sell Cobras and Shelbys but they didn’t look at the fine print—they were forbidden to sell them new because they weren’t Ford dealers!  But they could sell used cars…

     Phil Remington is given proper credit as Shelby’s most skilled mechanic. I don’t think there’s mention of Phil’s pre-WWII role as a hot rodder but that was one of the reasons Shelby chose Los Angeles to build the Cobra—because it was the birthplace of hot-rodding.  The brief Toyota episode in Shelby’s life is explored, showing the 2000GT cars that his team refined and raced but there’s no mention of Pete Brock’s oft-heard complaint that he had set up the deal to develop a race car out of the 2000GT and was about to sign a contract when Shelby swooped into Japan and made off with that plum assignment. Evans doesn’t want to get into politics, whereas sometimes that makes for entertaining reading.

     Art did some good digging in the case of the vanished Shelby Indy 500 turbine car. He came up with pictures of the car in its Botany 500 (clothing manufacturer) livery and does allude to hanky panky with the air intake, which most historians feel is the reason it was pulled before the race, never to turn a wheel in combat.

     The book has many fine photographic portraits of people. Even if Evans were not a writer, his portraits are remarkable into seeing into the subjects’ minds, “capturing their soul.”

 The epilogue, like Evans earlier book on Shelby the driver, is all too brief. There isn’t any explanation, for instance,  of why Shelby went to work for Iacocca at Chrysler. The picture of the  Shelby Series I, the Olds-powered car, gives the details of the car in a caption but gives no clue that at the car was a failure in the marketplace.

      Overall, I found this 128-page book less rewarding in terms of value-for-the-money than the Shelby-as-driver book by the same author and it’s a bit steep at $39.95. Still, nobody else could have done it--Evans must be respected in the auto racing community for the way so many people were forthcoming with information and pictures.  We wish some of the more deluxe coffee table books could have his level of expertise displayed instead of thinking we will be satisfied with pretty color “glamour” pictures of restored cars.

   One has to give credit to these independent historians, working on their own nickel (no cash advances for them) for coming up with pictures and info that take a lot of digging and a lot of contacts.

Book Review: SHELBY, the Race Driver

Book Review:SHELBY, the Race Driver with Remembrances by Carroll Shelby

By Art Evans.

Review by Wallace Wyss

Art Evans is an old-time race reporter who started writing about sports car racing while the sport was still in its infancy in the U.S., i.e. the early ‘50s.

His softbound book , in a horizontal format that allows you to make the car pictures bigger than in a vertical book, is a real visual treat. Obviously Evans worked long and hard to find hard to find pictures, but also includes a good many of his own as well as photos from Riddell Gregory, Ozzie Lyons, Bill Neale, Lester Nehamkin and Jim Sitz. Especially appreciated are the WWII-era pictures, for instance showing the type of Beechcraft plane that Shelby flew in as a training instructor. He also has pictures of Shelby in the first cars he ever raced, an MG- TC and soon after that an Allard.

      This is at the time Shelby was still a chicken farmer trying to figure out how to make a living at racing because at that time amateur racing in America was amateur—no factory teams.  Many of the words are from Shelby’s own book THE COBRA STORY, which goes in and out of print. Evans italicizes whenever he quotes the Shelby book so you can tell what he wrote from what Shelby wrote forty plus years ago when he wrote his own book (with a co-author).  Some of the rare pictures shown are Shelby with the Austin Healey land speed record car at Bonneville. Then there’s before-and-after pictures of the Austin Healey that Shelby wrecked during the Carrera Panamericana race in Mexico.

     Ironically for a guy who is famous most for his Ford powered Cobra, there’s many pictures of Shelby in this book driving Ferraris and Maseratis but that’s understandable as they were the fastest sports cars around back then, and Shelby had a talent for charming rich folks into sponsoring him.  Some people don’t know Shelby was a sports car dealer back then, partnered  with the brother of Jim Hall, another racer. The brands they carried were MG, Austin Healey, Jaguar, Maserati and Rolls Royce and Bentley. Shelby had already raced examples of the first four, among the more than 50 marques he has raced over the years.

     Evans dug deep to get the stories of some of Shelby’s forays into GM territory but the story on how he came to drive the Corvette SR2 isn’t satisfying—methinks the readers want to know why his Corvette driving period was very short indeed. It must have been GM’s anti-racing policy affecting even those they sold their race cars to when the Corporation abandoned their sports car racing effort in ’58.

     The book is roughly divided into year by year sections, with all Evans could find in each year put in each section. The Cuban Grand Prix story is very interesting because that was the race where Fangio, the world’s most celebrated race driver at the time, was kidnapped by anti-Castrol rebels. 

192 pg. softbound $29.95

Photo Data Research Inc. Redondo Beach,CA

The Shelby Mk. V

Shelby Mk  V aka The Mangusta

The Shelby Mk. V

Never heard of it? It reached the U.S. market as the Mangusta.

by Wallace A. Wyss

Carroll Shelby was a quick learner. He learned early on that the Cobra, particularly the leaf sprung Cobra descended from the 1953 A.C. Ace, had peculiar handling. The Cobra chassis was redesigned by Ford for the big block model, but it was never a sophisticated handler; more of a “point and squirt” device.

Once he became involved with the Ford GT40 in 1964, Shelby realized that mid-engined was the way to go. Having the engine between the axis made for a better polar moment of inertia, reducing the time a car takes to respond to turning input.

When the Group 7 cars began to emerge, Shelby wanted to get into it. He had earlier imported some Cooper Monacos, mid-engined cars, from England and had Cobra-ized 289 cast iron V8s installed. These were nicknamed by the press “King Cobras” but were dropped from his racing roster once he became involved with the Ford GT.

ENTER DE TOMASO

Then came Alejandro de Tomaso (from here on, we spell it the American with a capitalized “D”). An Argentine living in Italy, he was infamous for developing one race car after another, often with ingenious ideas but he had a penchant for always going on to the next idea; leaving the last project stillborn with no development.

Around 1962 he did get a mid-engined coupe into production, called the Vallelunga after a racetrack where the prototype in roadster form had some small success. This Ford Cortina-powered car was svelte looking, but handled only marginally, and the power output from a nearly stock engine was far below what it needed to beat Porsches in the same class.

Then in 1965 Shelby had his chief in-house designer, Peter Hall Brock, design a mid-engined car that would be good for the emerging Group 7 class in the U.S. The car had a svelte roadster body, with a mid-mounted V8 and a rear spoiler that finally saw the airfoil that Brock had envisioned for the Cobra Daytona coupe reach fruition. The driver could control the angle of a movable panel in the center of the airfoil so that the amount of download on the rear could be varied.

The car was innovative. Unfortunately the first coachbuilder, Frua, totally screwed up the design, so much so that Brock took the car over to Fantuzzi, who built many a race car, and had a new body designed that was closer to his clay model.

The racing world was awaiting the car and had their appetite whetted when DeTomaso rolled out a mockup of the chassis--a spine frame chassis with the engine connected to central spine, an idea that DeTomaso had reportedly cribbed from a German design of the 1920’s called the Rumpler.

Alas two such mercurial temperaments as DeTomaso and Shelby couldn’t get along for long—each had a penchant to take the limelight and there was room under that limelight for only one at a time. Plus Shelby had promised Ford he would make more Daytona coupes. The first Daytona had a body hand-hammered out in Los Angeles by Bill Honda, but the bodywork for the next batch was farmed out to Italy, to Carrozzeria Gran Sport in Modena. Once Shelby took the money out of the kitty provided by Ford to make more Daytonas he had none left to pay DeTomaso so DeTomaso glommed onto the race car project and finished it out as a Ghia show car called the 70P.

Whether one ever reached a racetrack is debatable. This writer has seen pictures of one being tested and even pictures of it being raced, but was it a real race, or just a gathering of individuals to watch a car being tested? And how many were made is even debated some 40 years later…maybe two…maybe three. Documenting early DeTomaso prototypes is like trying to catch cats, the history is elusive, and there are no fulltime DeTomaso serial number mavens equal to Marcel Massini is in the Ferrari world.

But DeTomaso never quite threw anything away. Here he had the world's attention with the spine frame and the 70P. Then luck came his way. Ghia had done a design for a rival firm, Iso of Bresso, who made Chevy V8-powered cars. Giugiaro had penned a dramatic mid-engine car that could have been the "little brother" of the big Iso Fidia four seater. But Renzo Rivolta, head of Iso, soundly rejected the idea so there was DeTomaso with a beautiful mid-engined car body design and no chassis to put it on. Wait a minute--what about the 70P chassis? Thus came the Mangusta.

THEN CAME THE MANGUSTA

The DeTomaso Mangusta is one of the most beautiful cars ever to come out of Italy. But it does have its problems.

It had a similar frame to the 70P race car but not quite. Around the perimeter of the floor-pan is tubing of quite a modest size. The body was heavy steel (except for the deck lids, which in some cars were aluminum). The car flexed like crazy.

The engine was a 302 in its American form, not the robust 302 that was in the Boss 302 of 1969 but a weak 302 that was reportedly available as a stationary industrial engine. It was a low revver but at least durable if you kept it below 6000 rpm.

The gearbox was a ZF 5-speed trans-axle similar to that in the GT40, ordered up after the disaster in the ’64 season when the Colotti gearboxes packed up whenever they were pushed hard.

One of the main problems of the Mangusta was that the gearbox was put in the same place vis-a-vis the engine as that in the GT40, with the result that it was quite low to the ground. Hit a pothole and you stood a chance of cracking the bell housing which was quite expensive. In the later Pantera. DeTomaso wisely flipped the gearbox around, so that it was a few inches higher off the road which the result less cracked gearbox casings.

The designer of the Mangusta was none other than Giorgetto Giugiaro, then just a very young man with only one other carrozzeria (Bertone) in his resume, but now arguably the most famous car designer in Italy. The car made it from the prototype to production with very few changes, the biggest being the adding of two vents to the rear deck “butterfly” wings in order to vent hot air out of the engine compartment.

Sitting in the Mangusta , one discovers how close the windscreen is to the driver’s head. This writer is 6’1” and grew uncomfortable having the windscreen only 3” from his head. So much for a design that looks good from all angles but forces you to accommodate to something arguably dangerous in order to get those good looks.

Today’s owners of the 400-odd cars (the general consensus was that 400 coupes were made and one roadster prototype ) sometimes defend it by saying the tires of the time were to blame. Others spend the development money DeTomaso should have spent, re-arranging the rear suspension a bit to correct flaws in the original design. Back in the car's original era, Sports Car Graphic did a whole number of trying to correct the car, such as fitting more modern Polyglas 60-series tires, finally concluding that it was tail heavy . Their staff was able to improve it, but it was all for naught, the car was only popular as The Car To Own in Tinseltown for a few months, soon eclipsed by the Lamborghini Miura, also mid-engined but with a high winding V12 engine with a real yowl.

SHELBY’S INVOLVEMENT

Carroll Shelby is nothing if not an entrepreneur. Despite the fact that DeTomaso had been so miffed when Shelby pulled funding on the 70P that he had named the subsequent road car the “mongoose” because in nature that is the natural enemy of the Cobra, Shelby was amenable to helping market it in the U.S.

At an auto show, probably the 1969 New York Show, a yellow Mangusta coupe was displayed along with the production Ford cars and the flier handed out to show-goers referred those interested in the car to Carroll Shelby, as if he were the distributor.

At the time, at least two Ford executive were in love with the car including the then VP in charge of design, Eugene Bordinet. Money was even spent in devising a rubber front bumper similar to that later used on the Ferrari 365GTC/4. That nose would have allowed it to meet the upcoming bumper regulations. The Mangustas that did make it into the U.S. were allowed in under a special law that exempted manufacturers who made less than 500 cars from many regulations, but even those regulations wouldn’t let it in past 1969.

During their brief love affair with the 'Goose, Ford dispatched two designers to Modena to inspect the Mangustas being built at Ghia Carrozzeria but they came back with a negative report. Their conclusion was that the term “production line” in this case was a misnomer--the cars were really hand-built with variations from car to car. Ford, back in Dearborn, had already tired of that way of doing things in the A.C. Cobras. They pulled away from wanting to import the Mangusta. Fortunately for DeTomaso, Kjell Qvale of British Motor Car Distributors in San Francisco took up the cause and imported at least 180 of the total, selling them for around $11,000 each.

This left Shelby out in the cold. He had been temporarily buoyed by Ford showing a Mangusta in an internal design review that had SHELBY Mk.V badges on it. The badges made sense,for, in 1967 Ford had won the 24 Hours of LeMans for the second time with a Ford GT called the Mk. IV.

But in that same design show there was another Ford prototype, the Mach 2C, a car designed by Ford designer Larry Shinoda that would have been all American-made. It was a svelte design, using a V8 larger than a 302, possibly a 400, and possibly fuel injected. It would have used a Borg-Warner gearbox. But that design became a political casualty when Shinoda’s boss, Semon Knudsen, was fired by Henry Ford II.

Ford had hired Bunkie") Knudsen away from GM, where he had spent 29 years , in the hopes he would bring some fresh ideas. But Knudsen had rather too many ideas, even going down to the Styling studio and insisting on changes in the upcoming cars. Henry Ford II summarily fired him after 19 months so all ideas connected to Knudsen were round-filed. When Knudsen left so did his fair-haired boy Shinoda, who Knudsen had brought over from Ford, and who had angered the other designers by reporting only to Knudsen, going around the entire design chain of command. Plus Knudsen had a mortal enemy at Ford—Lee Iacocca—of whom Time magazine quoted some Ford executive as saying: "Lee had chewed his way through ten layers of management to get where he was, and he was determined to chew his way through anyone who was placed above him."

Shelby did eventually come up with his own mid-engined design, the Lone Star, about which we’ll do a story on eventually. But it was ignored by Ford and now, some 40 years later, that single car is slowly being restored up in the Northwest where it is in the hands of a well-known Cobra historian.

The Mangusta occupies rather a strange perch. It is one of the great Sixties designs like the Ferrari Daytona and Lamborghini Miura, but where those cars have equally great engines, the mangusta does not. But that just goes to show you that “putting all the money on the outside,” an old Detroit slogan, sometimes works. The Mangusta put DeTomaso on the map and led to Ford buying his firm, and Carrozzeria Ghia, at a fat profit to DeTomaso.

He laughed all the way to the bank....

Television Show: "The Drivers" based off Wallace Wyss Book.

Seems the Ridley Scott production has been posted on the Internet Movie DataBase. I was excited enough when I found out Ridley was doing another Alien movie, now this! I normally do not watch television, but for this I'll be getting my rabbit ears out.