Mike and his youngest son, John (“Jay”), used to take the Panteras out for romps in the country. Here, John is in the 1972 (foreground), while Mike drives the European 1977 GTS. Text and photos copyright Michael Lamm 2012
I was quite taken with the Pantera when I saw an early one in Gene Gabbard’s Lincoln-Mercury showroom in 1971 – a white car that ended up being sold to a fellow who lived in the foothills east of Stockton. My first reaction was, “Wow, wouldn’t it be great to own a car like that someday!”
I saw the same Pantera again about 10 years later in our local Sears parking lot. The driver was climbing out, and I made it a point to go over and talk to him. I told him that if he ever wanted to sell the Pantera, I’d appreciate getting first dibs, and I handed him my business card.
Sure enough, a year or so later, he called and said he was coming to Stockton. Did I want to meet and talk about buying his Pantera? We met, and he mentioned that he wanted what he’d paid for the car: $10,000. I asked whether I could drive it, and he said yes, it’s possible, but the clutch wasn’t working due to a leaky slave cylinder. He’d driven down from the foothills by shifting without using the clutch; simply by matching engine and gear speeds. Did I know how to do that?
I said yes, I’d done it many times, but the fact that the Pantera’s clutch was out put me off. I had no idea at the time that honing a Pantera slave cylinder and installing a kit is no big deal. A rebuild kit cost, at the time, maybe $20. I could probably have bought a new slave cylinder for $100, but I didn’t know that then. In fact, I had no idea how simple and relatively inexpensive Panteras are to work on, so I passed. I usually do pass on the first of a series of cars I’m interested in, figuring I can make more educated judgments after checking out and driving several.
Lamm bought his first and favorite De Tomaso Pantera, the 1977 GTS, in 1983 and owned it for 17 years.
Meanwhile, I looked at and test drove a couple of Ferrari 308s, which I also liked in terms of looks and performance. As I began researching 308s, though, I discovered that the factory recommended changing the timing belt every five years. People I talked to said I’d be spending $4,000 to $5,000 every time I took a 308 in for that type of service and, since I’m basically cheap, I again started to look at Panteras.
I checked out a couple more, and then, in 1983, one came up for sale in Modesto, 30 miles south of here. It was unusual in a number of ways: a 1977 European GTS with the dropped floor, the Australian Ford 351 Cleveland V-8 and without fender flares. It was also totally original and seemingly rust free.
Mike’s 1977 GTS came with two sets of seats – these slim-line Corbeaus and the bulkier stock buckets. Later Panteras, including this one, had a one-inch dropped floor, which noticeably improved leg room.
Later Panteras also had Ford’s Australian 351 Cleveland V-8, a very reliable and potent engine. And a sunken battery compartment in the front trunk. A fiberglass trunk liner covers the transaxle, lifts out easily for access to engine.
Lincoln-Mercury stopped selling Panteras after 1974, and this particular 1977 GTS had been sold new in Belgium to a Swiss physician who’d used it, among other things, to go skiing. I found all this out much later, years after I’d bought the car. I paid $22,783 for it which, at that time, was by far the most I’d ever paid for anything except our house.
I remember being extremely nervous driving my newly acquired Pantera in traffic. Panteras have lousy rear vision and, for the first couple of weeks, I had a hard time forcing myself to make lane changes. After that, I loosened up, and the car started to feel normal in traffic.
The Pantera, to my mind, had a lot going for it. It looked good, it ran great – very strong and willing, like my old hot rod – and it turned out to be basically simple and easy to work on. Engine parts were cheap and readily available at places like Pep Boys and NAPA. Some of the steering components interchanged with the old Mercury Capri. Switches and electricals were shared with Alfa Romeo, and Maseratis used the same tail lights.
The car’s styling background also intrigued me, especially the link to the first Lincoln Zephyr. A young American stylist, Tom Tjaarda, created the Pantera body design while working at Ghia in Italy. Two generations earlier, Tom’s father, John Tjaarda, had been the prime mover behind the first Lincoln Zephyr. John Tjaarda built a prototype Zephyr (not called that) while at Briggs Manufacturing in Detroit. Briggs built bodies throughout the 1930s for Ford, Chrysler, Packard, Hudson, Studebaker, Graham and others. The Briggs/Tjaarda prototype used unit construction and a Ford V-8 in the rear. I liked the similarities, and I’ve long admired both Tjaardas as designers.
The Pantera uses a five-speed ZF transaxle, and I understand it’s virtually indestructible. I certainly never had any problem with it. The only tricky part is the linkage, which sometimes needs to be readjusted. But that, too, is fairly simple.
After I bought my first Pantera, I started noticing others around Stockton. One belonged to a scruffy young fellow who lived about a mile from my house. We’d run into each other at the local grocery. One day, I casually mentioned to him that…the usual thing about first dibs, and I handed him my card.
Lamm bought his 1971 Pantera in 1991. It was in tough shape when he got it, and he sold it again a year later at a considerable profit.
That particular Pantera, a 1971 model, wasn’t in very good shape – roughly as scruffy as its owner. In one of our meetings, he showed me rust spots in the lower engine compartment and asked whether I knew anyone who could fix them. I suggested a couple of local bodymen. And then, a month or so later, I saw the car parked out behind the guy’s house, covered with a blue plastic tarp – not a good sign.
Sure enough, in 1991, just before Christmas, he called and asked if I wanted to buy his car. I said I might, but I wasn’t willing to pay much because of the rust. He said, “How much’ll you give me?” and I thought for a minute and said, “How’s $8,000?” He said, “Fine, but I need it in cash, and I need it by next Tuesday.” I told him I’d have the money ready.
Engine belts, water pump, A/C compressor and alternator are accessible through interior after removing bulkhead cover.
That Tuesday we closed the deal. The car had a dead battery, so I brought one from my garage, and I drove the scruffy Pantera home. It barely ran, so I put my eldest son, Robert, to work on it. Rob essentially gave the engine a major tuneup: replaced most of the ignition system, installed new plugs and wires, cleaned out the carburetor.
After he’d gotten the car to start and run nicely, it was time to go through the interior, which looked and smelled like five years of bad mildew. In the process of cleaning and drying out the interior, we removed the seats. There was all sorts of junk under both, but beneath the passenger’s seat, I came across a small, blue packet that looked like Equal sweetener except there was no printing on it. I showed it to Rob, and he said, “Dad, don’t you know what that is?” “Equal sweetener?” I asked. “No,” he said, “That’s a packet of coke,” meaning cocaine. It finally dawned on me why the previous owner had accepted so little for the car and why he’d wanted the money in such a hurry.
Mike put stock Campagnolo wheels on the 1971 Pantera. This car had rust holes in the lower engine compartment.
I basically flipped this car. After grooming the 1971 Pantera and getting it to run decently, I took it to the spring swap meet at our local junior college and put a for sale sign on it. A fellow and his dad were down from Sacramento that weekend, and both were very interested in the car. They asked all the right questions, including about rust, and I showed them the bad spots in the engine compartment. Neither seemed especially perturbed, and I got the impression they could do the bodywork themselves. They bought the car for $18,500 which, at the time, was a good price, and I ended up making $8,346 on the deal.
Mike bought the 1972 Pantera in 1989, exactly the wrong time, and kept it for 10 years before selling the car at a loss.
Bought 1972 Pantera at the Top of the Market
Even before the scruffy 1971 Pantera came along, I’d started looking for other Panteras to buy and sell. In September 1989, at exactly the wrong time, I found a 1972 model in Visalia, about 170 miles south of Stockton. I’ve bought only two cars sight unseen, this Pantera and a 1964 Honda S600 roadster. In both cases, I relied on the owners’ descriptions to seal the deal. The Pantera owner and I agreed on a price, $22,500, and I got JoAnne to drive me down to pick it up.
The 1972 Pantera was rust free but needed considerable work to the drive axles and brakes.
The Visalia Pantera looked all right, and it ran okay, but I hadn’t asked the right questions. As I was driving home, I noticed quite a bit of play in the Pantera’s drivetrain. When I decelerated and then hit the gas again, I heard a definite clunk. Thank goodness it wasn’t inside the transaxle. Rather, the outer axle joints turned out to be shot, so one of the first things I did when I got the car home was to have all four U-joints and the axle bearings replaced.
The GTS (foreground) and 1972 Pantera spent a lot of time together.
Another problem soon cropped up with the brakes. The calipers wouldn’t release, but in no predictable order. One week it’d be one caliper that froze, and the next week it’d be another on the opposite side. I eventually had to buy all new rotors and also replaced the calipers, and that was neither cheap nor easy. It had never occurred to me to ask the previous owner about brakes or slop in the drivetrain.
Lamm spent a lot of time hunched over in his various Panteras’ engine compartments. A gardener’s knee pad on the transaxle make the position more tolerable.
Plus I ended up buying a new carburetor and a lot of little things. And as I mentioned, I’d bought the car at exactly the wrong time: September 1989. The next year, 1990, the collector-car bubble burst, and I was left holding an investment that just kept asking for more money: tires, battery and a lot of maintenance items. I hung onto this albatross for 10 years and had it during the time I bought and sold the scruffy ’71. The market still hadn’t improved much by 1999, but I sold the 1972 Pantera anyway and ended up losing $4,561, excluding inflation.
Mike’s last Pantera, a 1973 model, needed its engine totally overhauled. Mike and his friend, David Miller, did the work during the winter of 2003, with Miller acting as lead mechanic.
Did I learn my lesson? No, but my luck changed. In April 2003, a yellow-and-black 1973 Pantera came up for sale here in town, and I bought it for $20,000, figuring I’d flip it after a year or so. The engine needed a full overhaul, which a friend, David Miller, and I performed during that very cold winter.
When I got ready to sell the car in April 2004, I had $26,781 invested, but I sold it to a dealer in France for $29,600, so I managed to turn a profit of $2,819. It was the first of several cars I’ve sold overseas, and I’ve discovered that, with the euro as strong as it’s been, Europeans rarely haggle. I like to sell cars overseas.
A previous owner added the black racing stripes, but otherwise the 1973 was stock, a rarity in the Pantera world.
All the above profits and losses exclude my time and mechanical tinkering, and yes, I do declare these sales on my income taxes. The Panteras became investments, and I kept all four of them longer than a year, so they qualified as capital gains or losses.
The 1977 GTS, though, was my favorite, and I kept it throughout the time I bought and sold the others. I owned it for 17 years in all, and it often served as my daily driver. The one thing I didn’t like about it was having it smogged. Being a 1977 model, it came into this country with a DOT waiver – a blue sheet of paper with all the official stamps to prove it was legal and safe.
But the first time I went to have this car smogged in 1984, the smog tech said he couldn’t do it. Why not? No catalytic converters. Well, these cars never had catalytic converters, and besides, there’s no space to install them. Well, he didn’t care about that, and he sent me to a smog referee down by our local airport.
The smog ref came out and looked at the car. “Aha,” he said, “no catalytic converters!” That’s right, but where would you put them? He looked all underneath the car and into the engine compartment, and he finally came to the conclusion that cats wouldn’t be possible.
So what to do? The referee finally got out a sheet of paper and wrote some numbers on it. He then transferred the numbers to sticker, pasted it under the rear deck, and said, “Take your car back to the smog station and see if they can hit those limits.”
I went back to the smog tech and showed him the sticker. The tech said, “I’ll try.” He reset the ignition timing and then fiddled and diddled with the carburetor until, finally, the smog sniffer hit the numbers on the sticker. It took the tech a couple of hours, and when he finished, the engine barely ran. But it did pass smog.
I limped home. A couple of days later, no longer able to stand the wheezy-sneezy engine, I reset the timing and enriched the carburetor until the car ran fine again. But every time I had to have the car smogged – and in those days it was every year – the tech had to reset everything and then I had to re-reset it back to normal, and it really was a pain.
Alejandro De Tomaso chose this logo for the Pantera, but no one knows what it means. It might have honored his wife, Isabelle, or it might have been a variation of the Argentine flag turned on its side.
Air and Heat
All Panteras came standard with air conditioning, but the original A/C setup wasn’t very effective. I understand that most cars were equipped with York compressors. My 1977 GTS had the York compressor, and when you turned it on, the whole car shook. Cooling was minimal, and in really hot weather, which we have plenty of in Stockton, the engine would overheat driving around town.
I eventually replaced the York with a Sankyo rotary compressor out of a wrecked Mazda. The compressor cost $53, and the installation kit cost another $140. The Sankyo was smooth and quiet and cooled way better than the York. I also installed three aftermarket electric fans on the radiator up front – two pushers and a puller – and after that I had no heating problems. Even so, running the A/C around town tended to discharge the battery.
The other thing that happened with the ’77 GTS: About 10 years after I bought the car, I began to notice the paint bubbling up around the passenger’s lower door sill. It was starting to rust. And then pinholes began to appear in the rocker panel below the door. The holes grew larger over time, and it was obvious that the rocker was rusting from the inside out.
I took the car to the best bodyshop in town and was told that the entire rocker, which incorporated part of the door sill, would have to be replaced. Fortunately, aftermarket rockers were still available, and I bought one for $415. The bodyman had to cut and weld to make it fit, and with paint and a new De Tomaso GTS decal, the whole tab came to $2,121. After that, I began to notice tiny rust bubbles just below the windshield, but they never got bad, and I didn’t have them fixed.
In my opinion, all Panteras have rust to one degree or another. The sheetmetal is very thin, and most of it was never rust-proofed in any way. I understand that when Lincoln-Mercury was still selling Panteras in the early 1970s, they had serious problems with the body rusting through at suspension attachment points, but I never saw any evidence of that with the four cars I owned.
Lamm bought this lighted Pantera sign from his local Lincoln-Mercury agency several years after the dealer stopped selling Panteras.
All in all, I had a great time with my Panteras. In June 2000, I sold the 1977 GTS to a fellow here in town, and he eventually took it to Southern California. My net loss on the ’77 was $2,780, which wasn’t bad considering I’d enjoyed it for 17 years and learned a good deal from it. In fact, learned a good deal from all of them, one of the important lessons being that I should never buy any car with the purpose of making money. For me, it’s just not a good motive.
Michael Lamm grew up in South Texas. He has always loved cars and, after graduating from Columbia University in New York in 1959, took a job as editor of Foreign Car Guide, a magazine about VWs. In the mid 1960s, Mike became managing editor of Motor Trend and, in 1970, he co-founded Special-Interest Autos magazine in partnership with Hemmings Motor News. In 1978, Mike began to publish his own line of automotive books. For more information, go to www.LammMorada.com.