The story of De Tomaso *read below*

The italian car company De Tomaso was a famous and luxurious brand. The founder was the argentinian Alejandro de Tomaso ( That´s why the logo of De Tomaso has an argentinian flag on it ) , he was born in 1928 and went to Bologna in 1955. At first, he wanted to build race cars for the Formula 1 and he also built some cars, but they were never really used in the F1. He also built cars for the Formula 3 and Indianapolis, however, those weren´t used, too.

Well, after those failures, De Tomaso decided to build sports cars for the road. The first car he built was the beautiful De Tomaso Vallelunga in 1965. It was powered by a 1,5 litre four-cylinder engine with around 105 hp. Well, the car was built only 48 times, so it´s a pretty rare one.

The successor of the Vallelunga was the mid-engined Mangusta, which was introduced back in 1966, and built until 1968. There are only 400 exemplares, which means those cars are also very rare. The Mangusta was powered by a 4,7 litre V8 from Ford, which made around 305 hp.

Well, the most famous De Tomaso was built after the Mangusta, the very famous De Tomaso Pantera. The car was designed by Tom Tjaarda and it was built from 1971 to 1993. It was also by a V8, but this time a 5,8 litre V8 with 310 hp. Within a few years, nearly 6100 exemplares were built ( They had an agreement with Lincoln-Mercury) . After the Agreement was resolved, the car manufacturer only produced a few dozen(!) within a year! Well, there weren´t many changes on the car so after a amount of time, the car was sold badly.

Some years after the end of the production of the Pantera, they tried do revive the company and also had some good concepts, but they never managed to continuous build those cars. One car was the Qvale Mangusta. It had this name because they had some problems with the “sponsors”. It had a 4,6 litre V8 with 320 hp. Only 292 exemplares were made. The second one was the De Tomaso Guara. There were also some different versions, in the beginning they used BMW V8s, but later only Ford V8s, however, only 35 exemplares were made.

Well, in 2003, Alejandro De Tomaso died and the company didn´t make any more cars. The company went into insolvency and that was it with the famous brand. I think this is a shame, because the first cars were really good and I think they could have managed to find a way to produce more cars.
Thanks for reading!