Argentinian racing driver Alejandro De Tomaso launched his first supercar, the Vallelunga, in 1963. The first mid-engined Vallelunga had an aluminum body, then fiberglass, and was produced with small quantity. De Tomaso named it after the Vallelunga racetrack outside Rome, Italy, where he did most of his testing and it led to the much more widely known Pantera.
Fast forward to 2019, when the De Tomaso brand rose from the dead to launch the P72 as a retro-styled tribute to its history. It’s a showstopper, with a profile and curved profile reminiscent of a leopard just before it lunges forward. Finally, the company has finally announced that it will begin production of this stunning supercar in the second half of this year.
Beautifully engineered, the P72 is built on a full carbon monocoque chassis and is powered by a mid-mounted turbocharged Ford V8 engine. The company has a history with Ford; Vallelunga shared a four-cylinder engine with the Blue Oval’s Cortina and had been selling the Pantera for some time at US-based Lincoln and Mercury dealerships.
Jowyn Wong designed the P72 inspired by the P70, a one-off racing car developed in a short-lived collaboration between De Tomaso, Peter Brock and Carroll Shelby. When Shelby was hired by Ford to develop the GT40 (which would later dominate Le Mans in the late ’60s), the P70 project was canceled.
Rumored to be an “Italian greeting” (basically a middle finger) to Shelby, De Tomaso named his next car Mangusta, which means mongoose in Italian. By the way, mongooses are fierce hunters who eat snakes just like king cobras in the wild. Unfortunately for De Tomaso, his Mangusta never killed a Cobra on the track.
Only 72 P72s were produced in collaboration with the motorsport experts at HWA. Each will cost around 750,000 euros, or just a little more than $850,000. The company calls them “modern-day time machines,” and most of us will never see them on the road, but we can dream about them.
