De Tomaso P72: Retro Done Right

De Tomaso is back. The brand famous for the Pantera — the mid-engine, American-V8-powered Italian supercar of the 1970s that appeared in Miami Vice and in the garages of rock musicians who preferred their exotic cars to work reliably — has been revived by the same team behind the Apollo Intensa Emozione (IE). Their first car, the P72, is a tribute to the failed De Tomaso P70 prototype from the 1960s — a joint project between the Argentine-Italian entrepreneur Alejandro de Tomaso and the American racing legend Carroll Shelby. The car never raced. The dream never died.

De Tomaso: A Brief History of Ambition

Alejandro de Tomaso was born in Buenos Aires in 1928 and moved to Italy in 1955, initially as a racing driver and eventually as a manufacturer. He established De Tomaso Automobili in Modena in 1959, operating from the same city as Ferrari and Lamborghini — the gravitational center of Italian automotive excellence.

De Tomaso’s approach was characteristically hybrid: Italian design and craftsmanship married to American muscle and commercial pragmatism. The Mangusta (1967) and the Pantera (1971) both used Ford V8 engines — torquey, powerful, relatively inexpensive, and sold through Ford’s dealer network in the United States. This gave De Tomaso access to the American market in a way that Ferrari and Lamborghini struggled to achieve through their limited dealer networks.

The Pantera was not a great car by the standards of its Italian competitors — the build quality was poor, the electrics unreliable, and the chassis dynamics compromised by its hot, American V8 — but it was dramatically beautiful, genuinely fast, and available at a price point well below a Ferrari 308. Elvis Presley owned one, and reportedly shot it with a pistol when it refused to start.

The company declined through the 1980s and 1990s, eventually going bankrupt in 2004. What followed was a series of ownership changes and revival attempts that came to nothing.

The P70: The Car That Never Raced

The De Tomaso P70 of 1965 is one of automotive history’s great might-have-beens. Alejandro de Tomaso and Carroll Shelby — two of the most compelling characters in 1960s motorsport — collaborated on a mid-engine prototype intended to compete at Le Mans. The car was designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro (then at Ghia) and used a Ford V8 engine. It was beautiful, ambitious, and completely unsuccessful.

Development problems, a breakdown in the partnership between de Tomaso and Shelby, and the sheer difficulty of creating a competitive Le Mans prototype as a small enterprise all contributed to the P70’s failure. Only one chassis was completed, and it never raced. The design was abandoned, and de Tomaso moved on to other projects.

The P72 takes the P70’s design language — the bubble cockpit, the long hood, the flowing rear haunches — and realizes it with 2020s engineering. It is what the P70 might have become if de Tomaso and Shelby had succeeded in their collaboration.

Design: 1960s Curves in Carbon Fiber

The P72 is widely considered one of the most beautiful cars of the modern era, and the reason is the authenticity of its historical reference. This is not a car that has been styled to look vaguely retro — it is a car that has been designed with genuine attention to the proportions, surfaces, and details of 1960s prototype racing cars.

Curves: The bodywork is voluptuously curved in the manner of 1960s Italian coachbuilding. The front fenders swell over the wheels with a roundness that modern cars — dominated by CAD-generated surfaces — rarely achieve. The cockpit bubble protrudes from the roof like a jet canopy, a direct reference to the P70 and to 1960s Can-Am and Le Mans prototype racers.

Copper Details: Throughout the exterior, copper-colored details — around the grilles, on the exhaust outlets, on the door handles — create a visual warmth that contrasts with the carbon fiber and painted surfaces. This use of copper as a design detail is unique to the P72 and gives it an artisanal, jewel-like quality that competitors lack.

Chassis: Underneath the retro skin lies the cutting-edge carbon fiber monocoque from the Apollo Intensa Emozione (IE) — a track-focused hypercar that uses identical underpinnings. The connection between the P72’s 1960s bodywork and the Apollo’s racing chassis is both architectural and philosophical: the beauty of the past, supported by the technology of the present.

Glass Canopy: The roofline features a glass bubble canopy that provides excellent visibility while maintaining the car’s proportion. The glass treatment references the P70 directly, and the way the canopy sits above the roofline creates a silhouette that is immediately recognizable from any angle.

The Engine: American Muscle, Italian Soul

True to De Tomaso history — and true to the spirit of the P70’s Ford V8 — the P72 uses an American V8 in an Italian car.

Source: The engine is a 5.0-liter supercharged V8 derived from the Ford Mustang GT500’s Predator engine, tuned by Roush Performance — one of America’s most respected engine development specialists. The choice of Roush is deliberate: they have decades of experience extracting performance from Ford’s V8 architecture, and their involvement gives the P72’s engine both credibility and a connection to American motorsport heritage.

Power: 700 hp from a supercharged V8 — not the most in any hypercar, but more than adequate for a car of the P72’s character. The supercharger provides instant, linear torque delivery that suits the car’s grand touring intent: it pulls strongly from low RPM, builds to a crescendo at high revs, and sounds entirely different from either a turbocharged engine or a naturally aspirated V12.

Sound: The supercharger whine — a distinctive, high-pitched mechanical sound that overlays the V8’s exhaust note — is one of the P72’s defining characteristics. It references the sound of American muscle cars and NASCAR machinery, filtered through an Italian exhaust system that adds character and drama to the fundamental American sound.

Gearbox: A manual gearbox — six speeds, traditional H-pattern, clutch pedal. In 2023, this is a statement as much as a specification choice. The decision to offer a manual as the primary (and only) gearbox option for the P72 reflects the same philosophy as Pagani’s Utopia: that the best driver’s cars are the ones that require the driver to actually drive.

The Interior: Jewel Box

The interior of the P72 is, by universal agreement, the most beautiful aspect of the entire car — and given the quality of the exterior, this is a significant statement.

Materials: The dominant material is polished copper — used for the instrument bezels, the central console structure, the air vents, and numerous other details. Against the dark leather of the seats and the woven carbon fiber of the dashboard surfaces, the copper glows warmly. The effect is of a 1960s cockpit translated into a 2020s language — recognizable in its reference, extraordinary in its execution.

Gauges: The instruments are diamond-quilted leather on the surrounding panels and machined aluminum bezels on the gauge housings themselves. The dials look like expensive Swiss chronographs — analog, precise, and crafted rather than printed.

The Shifter: The exposed manual gear linkage that runs through the center console is, to many observers, the single most beautiful object in the P72’s interior. A solid aluminium rod connects the gear knob to the transmission. Every movement of the gear lever is reflected in the visible mechanical linkage. When you change gear, you can see the mechanism responding. It is automotive voyeurism — watching the machine do exactly what you asked it to do, translated into visible motion.

Build Quality: De Tomaso contracted a team of specialist craftsmen — many with backgrounds in Italian furniture and luxury goods manufacturing — to assemble the P72’s interiors. Each car takes approximately 700 hours of interior labor to complete.

Exclusivity: 72 Examples

Only 72 units will be built — a number that references the company name. The price is approximately €750,000, which positions the P72 at the entry level of the bespoke hypercar market — below a Pagani Huayra, below a Koenigsegg Jesko, but above any conventional production supercar.

For €750,000, the P72 represents extraordinary value by the standards of its category. The Apollo IE chassis, the Roush-tuned V8, the handcrafted interior, and the 1960s-inspired bodywork combine to create a car that is visually more interesting than most of its more expensive competitors.

The P72 proves a principle that seems counterintuitive in a market obsessed with power figures and lap times: you don’t need 2,000 horsepower to be special. You need a clear vision of what you want to say and the craft to say it beautifully. De Tomaso, on its return, said something very beautiful indeed.