De Tomaso Pantera GT5, Red, for sale in Huntington Station, New York, for $75,500.

--Red with Black leather interior and Black carpeting, 351 Cleveland V-8, 11,500 Original Kilometers/7,500 Original Miles from new, 5-speed manual, Collector owned and cared for.

Alejandro De Tomaso founded his auto building firm, De Tomaso Automobili, in Modena, Italy in 1959. Like many a race car builders, he hoped to emulate Ferrari and build road cars that would embody the qualities of his racing cars and be fast, good handling cars.

His first effort at a road car, introduced in 1963, was the Vallelunga, a small fastback coupe named after a racetrack near Rome. It was powered by a practical four cylinder Ford Cortina engine. This became a De Tomaso hallmark--to feature exotic styling on the outside but always have an off-the-shelf production engine under the engine lid.

After 52 Vallelunga coupes were made, DeTomaso received some investment capital and decided to build the bigger Ford V8-powered mid-engined Mangusta (Mongoose). Visually, it was a match for Lamborghini’s Miura, though its Ford V8 was not high-tuned as the engines in purebred foreign exotics.

In 1969, Ford Motor Company in Dearborn happened to be looking for an Italian exotic car company to buy. Fortunately, De Tomaso gave Ford an advance peek at models for his new car, the Pantera. Today Panteras are among the most bulletproof of exotic Italian cars on the road and, as a result, they are far cheaper to run and own than Ferraris, Maseratis and Lamborghinis due to De Tomaso and Ford’s choice of an off-the-shelf Mustang engine, the 351-C, as the powerplant.

Even though Ford canceled importation of the Pantera to the U. S. in 1974, De Tomaso had retained the right to market the car in the rest of the world and he built several thousand more Panteras in the next two decades, including the rare and exciting GT-5, with its \"running boards, \"deep front spoiler and tall Countach-style rear wing-on-stilts as offered here.

This is a rare opportunity to purchase and exceptional, low mileage example of the Pantera GT5’s of which few have been imported to the USA.