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hirocimacruiser · 2 years ago

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DE TOMASO HISTORY

DE TOMASO

What is De Tomaso who poured hot Latin blood into Charade?

Text by Takumi Yoshida (motor journalist)

The completion of the Charade De Tomaso II is a proud occasion that prompts me to express my heartfelt thanks and congratulation to all that have made this project possible.

This is the second version of the Charade De Tomaso which, in close collaboration with Daihatsu, reflects my input of expertise and know-how.

It is my sincere wish and intention that this is only the second step in a more frequent and wider future collaboration with Daihatsu and, as such, I consider the Charade De Tomaso II an epoch-making model.

I am very proud indeed in presenting the new Charade De Tomaso II and hope that the young people of Japan will derive as much pleasure from it as we all did in working to make it a reality.

This car is the second Charade that I have tuned as a production car.

There is a deep connection between Daihatsu and our company, and I am happy to be able to show my skills again. I think that such attempts should be made more, and in that respect, the Charade de Tomaso is a car of great significance. It is my sincere hope that the feeling of Charade de Tomaso will be strongly supported by young people in Japan.

A young De Tomaso who was active as a racing driver. In a hot Latin country, sports cars and

Italy, the kingdom of motor sports. From long ago, the insatiable admiration for speed has been the spiritual backbone, and many beautiful and high-performance sports cars have been created by making full use of the mechanism and genius for beauty unique to Latin people. And De Tomaso also had such a postwar

Born Italian sports big money

It is one of the mu. Just as Ferrari had Enzo and Lamborghini had Ferrucci, De Tomaso had, of course, a founder with a strong personality who established his own sports car philosophy and established it as a manufacturer. . That is Alessandro De Tomaso.

However, unlike Enzo and Ferruccio, De Tomaso was not a genuine Italian. His grandfather and grandmother were born in Italy, but he was born of Italian and Spanish ancestry in Argentina, South America, where his grandfather and grandmother emigrated.

Argentina, a country in Latin America, is far from Europe, the home of motor sports, but people have a strong passion for Italians, and races have been actively held since ancient times. If you remember that Argentina was the birthplace of Juan Manuel Fangio, the famous racing driver who won the F1 world championship five times in the 1950s, you can understand what kind of country it was.

It would have been no surprise that De Tomaso, who had grown up there and had Italian heritage, would have been inspired by Fangio's success to become a racing driver. It was in 1951, at the age of 25, that he drove his first racing car in Argentina. In the mid-1950s, De Tomaso moved to Europe and settled in Modena, northern Italy, a mecca for high-performance sports cars 1, home to Ferrari and Maserati. He knocked on the door of Maserati there, first working as a mechanic and then quickly becoming a racing driver. His first result as a Maserati driver came in 1956 when he finished fourth in a sports car race in Argentina.

De Tomaso soon left Maserati for Osca. Originally Masse

Founded in Bologna by the Maserati brothers, who were the founders of Larti, Osca was a manufacturer specializing in small-displacement racing sports cars, but De Tomaso's most glorious career as a racing driver was at this Osca. It will be built in time. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he drove a small Oska sports car with his ferocious driving style to numerous small-displacement class victories.

1959 in Modena

Established De Tomaso Automobili. But at that time another ambition flared up in Alessandro De Tomaso. It was to send out racing cars and sports cars bearing his name according to his own plans. In 1959, he founded a company called De Tomaso Automobili in Modena. Modena and its environs are the perfect place to create fast and beautiful cars, with countless studios with artistic craftsmen building every new chassis and body.

De Tomaso spent the first few years developing and building racing cars with a focus on single-seater formulas. De Tomaso probably thought that if he wanted to use his experience as a racing driver, he should make a racing car. Starting with the introductory Formula Junior, through F2, and finally to F1, these machines never achieved great track success.

One of the reasons for this is said to be Alessandro de Tomatsu's "new-things-loving personality." He said he got so caught up in it that he didn't take the time to mature his first car.

On the other hand, De Tomaso seems to have been quite loyal. One of the reasons why he didn't get into sports cars for a while after working for De Tomaso Automobili was because of his loyalty to the Maserati brothers. Tsuma de Tomaso was about to move to Italy and make a name for himself as a racing driver. I didn't like it.

first sports car

Small high performance Vallelunga.

However, in the early 1960s, De Tomaso began developing a sports car. Its first creation was the Vallelunga, a small high-performance GT named after a circuit on the outskirts of Rome. First introduced at the 1963 Turin Auto Show with an open aluminum body, the Valenta was released two years later with a low FRP coupe body produced by Carrozzeria Ghia. It was a small but hard-hitting car with a hidden suspension and a mid-engined engine. De Tomaso didn't have its own power unit, so the engine installed in the midship was a tuned British Ford mass-produced OHV 4-cylinder. However, the Vallelunga was a lightweight model of 640 kg, so it demonstrated high performance reaching a maximum speed of 208km/h, and it was said that a racing specification would reach 230km/h. The Vallelunga was a GT that could be used for racing, as was the case with De Tomaso's work at the time, when he was fully immersed in the world of motorsports. The Vallelunga was a fan favorite, but it was not a commercial success, with only 580 built, including prototypes. Therefore, it was a super sports Mangusta that was much larger than the next model de Tomaso planned by taking advantage of the relationship with Ford and Ghia cultivated by Vallelunga. The Mangusta, which made a spectacular debut in 1966, was a mid-engined backbone chassis with the same basic configuration as the Vallelunga, with a Ford 4.7ℓ V8 engine from the United States mounted in the mid-engined car. The sharp shape of the designed body gives it a fresh appeal.The maximum speed was announced to be over 250km/h. DeTomaso has finally created a supersport car on par with Ferrari and Lamborghini.

Pantera became a super long-selling super sports.

The successor to the Mangusta was announced in 1970 as the Pantera, a super sports super long-selling model that has survived to this day. The V8 engine was expanded to 5.8L, and at the same time, it was designed by Tom Giarda, who became the new gear chief. was a model. The Pantera is much heavier than the Mangusta, and although it loses some of its sharpness as a supersport, the rigidity of the chassis has been greatly improved, and the price in the United States is less than 10,000 dollars. As a supercar, an exceptional price was realized. As a result, in the early 1970s, just before the oil crisis, De Tomaso produced 2000 cars a year.

In 1990, De Tomaso showed that it was still a supersport manufacturer by introducing a new edition of the Pantera with a Ford 4.9L V8 in a body reworked by Gandini. In addition to these mid-engined sports cars, De Tomaso also added large, high-end front-engined cars to its lineup in the 1970s, such as the Longchamp sports coupe and the Deauville 4 door saloon. Later, the prestigious Maserati was also brought under its umbrella, and the Biturbo series was released to the world.

Innocenti Mini with Daihatsu engine.

On the other hand, De Tomaso also tried his hand at small passenger cars. In 1976 he bought Innocenti, which produced Bertone-designed Italian Minis based on British Minis, and dominated it until 1990, when he sold it to Fiat. In fact, the relationship between Daihatsu and De Tomaso was born from this Innocenti Mini. De Tomaso, who was looking for a new power unit for this car, took notice of the first-generation Charade's SOHC 3-cylinder 1-liter engine, and from 1982 produced the Innocenti cylinder equipped with it. As a result, Daihatsu asked De Tomaso to design a sporty model of the Charade, and after several prototypes, the Charade was created in 1984 based on the second-generation Charade.

It was de Tomaso Turbo.

After that, the relationship between Daihatsu and De Tomaso

The midship prototype that was exhibited at the 1985 Tokyo Show, and the De Tomaso version of the 3rd generation Charade base that was exhibited at the 1987 Tokyo Show were both produced in cooperation. And now, the name of De Tomaso has been revived in the sporty model of the 4th generation Charade, bringing back the hot Latin air. By the way, I met Mr. Alessandro De Tomaso in Italy a few years ago. When I visited Modena on a tour of a classic car race called the Mille Miglia, Mr. De Tomaso, a local auto-industry celebrity, attended dinner with me. There, I shook hands with him and exchanged greetings, but I didn't reach the point of conversing, but it was the car he drove that left an impression on me.

After a long, Italian-style dinner, I stepped out of the restaurant just after two o'clock in the morning to find Mr. De Tomaso about to get into the car driven by his female secretary, who was his success. It was a modest thing that was quite different from the image of He got in the passenger seat of a black Innocenti Mini. I felt like I saw an unexpected side of Mr. De Tomaso there, but now that I think about it, that Innocenti Mini might have been a cylinder model with a Daihatsu 3-cylinder engine.

#De Tomaso #De Tomaso charade #detomaso pantera #Detomaso mangusta

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