The Mangusta: Beauty Born By Revenge
Built more by ego than engineering, the Mangusta is another testament to the power of spite. Sold before it was sorted, it is a reminder of how often beauty truly is skin deep. But it’s a beauty that might kill you or seduce you, and it doesn’t care which.
Let’s call it an Argentinian’s grudge, wrapped in Italian steel, powered by an American beast.
And it just might be the most dramatic car ever built.
Like many good stories, this one too, begins in failure. In Late 1964, Alejandro de Tomaso - the Argentine aristocrat, former racing driver, and industrialist - struck a deal with Carrol Shelby to build five P70 race cars for the Can-Am series. Shelby funds it, Pete (great name btw) Brock designs it. De Tomaso promises it, but doesn’t quite deliver.
It didn’t go well.
Ideas collided. Schedules slipped. No cars arrived. Shelby, fuming, packed up his shit and walked straight to the Ford GT40 program. Alejandro, as reports at the time politely put it, was “quite upset.
In less polite terms, he was super fucking pissed. And so, he did what any proud Latin racing driver would do.
He built a car. He named it “Mangusta.” Italian for mongoose.
I.e. the only animal that can kill a Cobra.
Yes. It was that kind of car.
Even in vengeance, Alejandro knew what he didn’t know. He needed beauty. The kind that sells posters and magazines.
So he went to the greatest stylist in Italy at the time: Giorgetto Giugiaro. Freshly escaped from Bertone, now sketching futures at Carrozzeria Ghia, Giugiaro spoke the language of architectural aggression.
What he created was a thing of beauty. Ultra-low, glassy, wedged. The haunches tense with American horsepower. And the rear, with its famous twin gull-wing panels lifting like a mechanical scorpion tail to reveal a Ford V8.
But was it truly beautiful, or dangerous looking, which is a different thing entirely.
The Mangusta was exotic in layout, shape, and temperament.
Mid-engine, rear-drive, American heart. A Ford 289 or 302 V8, routed through a ZF five-speed transaxle. Four-wheel Girling discs. Rack-and-pinion steering. Fully independent suspension. All on a steel backbone chassis borrowed from the abandoned P70 race car.
A top speed of 155 mph in 1967? Oh yes. It was fast.
Unfortunately the Mangusta wasn’t engineered to work. It was engineered to exist. And to exist solely out of spite.
And so, the flaws arrived early and often: Handling? Numb at low speed, evil at high speed. A 44/56 weight split meant tail-first enthusiasm in corners. Ergonomics? Claustrophobic. Off-center pedals. Steering column exactly where your knees wanted to be. Chassis? About as rigid as a French onion. The torque of the Ford V8 twisted it like linguine.
But many buyers didn’t care. They hadn’t bought a car. They’d bought a piece of rolling art.
Only 401 Mangustas were built. Most went to the U.S. under a federal waiver that said, in essence, “We don’t know what it is, but it seems important.”
When the waiver expired in 1969, De Tomaso simply did what Italian manufacturers always do when confronted by American federal law:
He gave the car pop-up headlights, shrugged, and kept building them by hand.
Only one Mangusta ever left the factory with a Chevrolet engine. It was built for GM Design Chief Bill Mitchell, because Mitchell insisted on not driving anything powered by Ford. A custom spacer was machined to mate the Chevy small-block to the ZF transmission. Mitchell drove it briefly, then handed it to designer Dick Ruzzin, who still owns it, 55 years later.
In a world of prototypes and show-cars, this one became a legend simply by surviving.
Ford was watching. Not because the Mangusta was fast, or good, or reliable. But because it made noise. Cultural noise.
This Argentine upstart was building American-powered Italian exotics that people actually wanted.
Ford took the bait.
They invested. They partnered. And from that unholy union came something better engineered, better built, and better selling:
The De Tomaso Pantera.
Think of it like a wild idea getting a second draft.
In the end, the Mangusta was never meant to be perfect. It was meant to provoke, meant to make Alejandro de Tomaso impossible to ignore.
And it worked.
It’s a reminder that sometimes, greatness doesn’t come from precision engineering.
Sometimes, it comes from spite.
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