Building Speed: Dave Oldaker's 1972 De Tomaso Pantera
When building a racecar, there’s a line you shouldn’t cross, and it’s not the median on a two-lane blacktop. You’re putting together a speed machine, a super-fast mechanical marvel, and the type of steel monster that whiz-bangs past startled cattle on country roads. But there’s a limit to how fast you should go. And Dave Oldaker worries he’ll make that “last fatal mistake.”
In Oldaker’s case, this means mounting a twin turbo onto his 1972 De Tomaso Pantera, giving him 700 horsepower of acceleration and the ability to blow out his 200 mph speedometer.
Getting behind that much power is suicidal, Oldaker says.
Having replaced and reworked much of the original body and engine, it’s unlikely this 50-year-old, Athens, Ga. landlord will do himself in behind the wheel of his seven-year-long project; his attachment to the car should avoid any drastic, conceited errors.
After an exhaustive Internet search, Oldaker found his Pantera, one of 5,500 sold in the U.S., around seven years ago. One of these treasured, Italian-designed racecars turned up in a Craigslist sale somewhere in Chico, California. The car had been aging ungracefully in a barn for almost 30 years; its original red finish was dinged and rusty.
“It was ugly, had skinny rims and a suspension that had been shimmed all wrong,” says Oldaker. “But something in my head said this is the one, maybe because it needed so much love.”
In the late 60s, Ford Motors looked to Italian carmakers for a new, exotic mid-level car they could sell through their Lincoln-Mercury line. After an early deal with Ferrari dissolved, the automotive giant found De Tomaso, another Italian company known for their Mangusta model, who was eager to roll out their new Pantera. The car arrived stateside and immediately ran into problems. Initial track tests were weak and tags of poor craftsmanship began to surface. American drivers were excited for a speedy, European racecar at a reasonable price ($10,000), but an inefficient engine design and an inability to meet tightening U.S. standards, as well as many other factors, pulled the car off the market in 1975.
This barn-aged Pantera appeared just as Oldaker’s marriage began to dissolve, a time when rebuilding a suspension and replacing the induction on an old racecar eased a troubled mind. “I could just escape into my garage and just build this thing and the whole world would just pass me by.”
Oldaker is an unassuming gear head; he’s coy but smiling as he talks about his car. Over the blue jeans and faded shirt that could pass as a speed demon uniform, he wears a black sport coat that’s one size too big; on a sunburned nose framed by shaggy grey hair sits a pair of thin-rimmed glasses. He’s known around Athens for leading a charge against the expansion of an insulation plant that would’ve increased harmful air particulates in the area. (When I asked him about the relationship between his car and air pollution, he said his well maintained vehicle runs pretty clean, it’s those old clunkers on the road we should be worried about.) But while he doesn’t fit the grease monkey stereotype, he’s well versed in hot rod language.
Oldaker’s Pantera engine is a 351 Cleveland 4V, “which means its got the giant fire breathing cylinder heads that have no respect for gas mileage…and a carburetor that’s ridiculously too big.”
Over the past seven years, Oldaker has rebuilt the rear suspension with all new bearings, added a new fiberglass rear deck lid, four downdraft 48idf Webers with aluminum head ports matched to the carburetor and all new Hall Pantera urethane bushings. There’s also an aluminum flywheel, an open plenum manifold, a Fluidyne radiator, an updated steering rack and Hall Pantera rear pipes. He’s also repainted the body, opting out of a traditional cherry red color for the modern pearl grey popular on newer Mustangs.
But after all that work there’s really only one question: how fast can it go?
The speedometer reads over 200 mph, but he’s only clocked 140, which is not that impressive, he says, because you barely feel the speed in the car. It’s accelerating that’s really fun; going from 0 to 100 in a few seconds is at the heart of building and driving a hotrod.
When I asked the mechanic/physics specialist in my family about acceleration, he said that it’s basically a horsepower to weight ratio. By stuffing a monstrous, high-horsepower engine into a smaller framed car, hotrods expedite acceleration. So when Oldaker makes small, weight-reducing changes to his engine, such as adding an aluminum flywheel, the car becomes lighter, allowing him to make quick work of reaching that 140 mph top out, even if only by a fraction of a second.
Oldaker plays it cool when discussing speed, even lightning fast ones. “It’s not like I’m getting away with anything, when you build racecars it’s just something you do,” he says. All modesty aside, driving fast isn’t that great of a skill. Given the right conditions, anyone can do it; Oldaker thinks all you need to drive fast is to have access to a racecar and be relatively sober.
There’s got to be more to it than that: something romantic like the wind in your hair, or scientific like g-forces, or what about that fatalistic, suicidal calamity that’s only one step away.
He says it’s very important to have working brakes.