1973 Ford Pantera Widebody – Ford GT Front End

This widebody 1973 De Tomaso Pantera hides a serious trick under its flared fenders: a Ford GT front end grafted onto an Italian mid-engine body, backed by a 351 Cleveland V8 and a ZF five-speed transaxle. Ford sold the Pantera through Lincoln-Mercury dealers for just a few years before an oil crisis and warranty headaches ended the partnership. Read on to find out what it took to merge two very different Fords into one genuinely double-take build.

Some builds sneak up on you. You walk past a car, catch the wide fenders and the chromed engine peeking out the back, and it’s not until a second look that you realize the front end doesn’t belong to the car it’s bolted to at all. That’s exactly what happens with this widebody Pantera, a proper double-take build if there ever was one. It takes a serious eye for proportion to graft a completely different nose onto a mid-engine Italian exotic and have it actually work, and this one pulls it off well enough that plenty of onlookers walk past twice before the swap even registers. So what’s the story behind putting a Ford GT face on a De Tomaso body, and why does the drivetrain underneath matter just as much as the styling trick up front?

The Pantera Was Already a Ford, Sort Of

It’s easy to forget the Pantera was never some independent Italian exotic sold through a boutique importer. De Tomaso sold the U.S. distribution rights to Ford, and more than three-quarters of Pantera production moved through American Lincoln-Mercury dealerships between 1972 and 1975. 1973 turned out to be a pivotal year for that partnership — the oil crisis and tightening U.S. emissions rules cooled Ford’s enthusiasm fast, and the two companies split for good the following year, leaving the Pantera to soldier on in Europe without its American sales channel. For the handful of model years the arrangement lasted, buyers got something genuinely unusual: a mid-engine exotic backed by Ford’s dealer network and parts-bin V8 power, sold at a fraction of what an equivalent Italian supercar commanded at the time.

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A 351 Cleveland V8 in a Mid-Engine Body

Under the widebody flares, this Pantera is still running a Ford 351 Cleveland V8, which by 1973 had been detuned for emissions compliance to a factory-rated 248 net horsepower off a roughly 8.6-to-1 compression ratio, down from the 335-horsepower, 11.0-to-1 tune the same engine wore just two years earlier. Even detuned, that’s real output for a mid-engine exotic of this era, routed through a ZF five-speed manual sitting right behind the driver, and it’s exactly the kind of power that demands the extra rubber a widebody kit is built to cover. Compression and horsepower kept sliding on the Cleveland through the rest of the decade as emissions equipment grew more aggressive, which makes this comparatively early, comparatively strong 1973 tune one of the last genuinely potent versions Ford built before the numbers dropped further still.

Why the Ford-De Tomaso Partnership Fell Apart

The split wasn’t just about the oil crisis. Early Panteras built a rocky reputation with American dealers unfamiliar with servicing a mid-engine Italian exotic, and quality control issues in the unibody construction led to well-documented warranty headaches that soured plenty of Lincoln-Mercury service departments on the whole arrangement. Combine that with tightening emissions rules squeezing horsepower out of the Cleveland V8 and a fuel crisis making big-displacement exotics a harder sell, and Ford’s exit from the partnership looks less like a surprise and more like an inevitability.

The ZF Transaxle That Made It All Possible

The five-speed ZF transaxle bolted behind the Cleveland V8 wasn’t a Pantera-specific part — the same German-built unit saw duty in other European exotics of the era, prized for handling serious torque in a compact mid-engine package. Pairing an American V8 with a proven European transaxle was part of what made the Pantera formula work in the first place: domestic muscle-car power delivered through genuinely sorted Italian-influenced mid-engine handling, at a price that undercut a Ferrari or Lamborghini by a wide margin.

Grafting a Ford GT Face onto an Italian Body

Swapping in a completely different front clip is not a bolt-on afternoon project — it typically means reshaping the nose structure, re-routing cooling ducts, and matching body lines so the transplant reads as one cohesive design rather than a parts-bin mashup. Whoever built this Pantera clearly understood proportion well enough to make a Ford GT face look like it always belonged there, which is a much harder trick than it looks once you understand how differently the two cars’ underlying structures were engineered.

What Original Panteras Struggle With Today

Unmodified Panteras have a well-earned reputation for rust-prone unibody construction, particularly around the rocker panels and floor pans, which is part of why so many surviving examples today have been modified, restored, or built up rather than left bone stock. Parts scarcity compounds the problem — De Tomaso’s low production numbers mean reproduction body panels and interior trim are far harder to source than for a mainstream Ford or Chevrolet of the same era.

The Collector Market for Modified vs. Original Panteras

That reality splits the Pantera collector world roughly in two: purists chasing numbers-matching, unmodified examples for maximum value, and enthusiasts who’d rather drive a well-executed custom build like this widebody than baby an original. Values for documented, unmolested Panteras have climbed steadily as good examples get scarcer, but a tastefully built custom with real fabrication skill behind it, like this Ford GT-nosed widebody, draws its own dedicated following regardless of what an auction house would appraise it at.

The Fabrication Work Behind a Build Like This

Widening a car body this dramatically is not a bolt-on job. It typically means flaring or fabricating new quarter panels, re-engineering suspension geometry to actually use the extra width, and matching paint and body lines so the whole car reads as one cohesive shape instead of a kit stuck onto a stock body. Combine that level of metalwork with the effort of grafting on an entirely different nose from another Ford model, and this Pantera represents a serious amount of fabrication talent, not just a parts-catalog build. Getting the panel gaps, stance, and paint transitions to look factory-intentional rather than aftermarket-obvious is the detail that separates a build worth a second look from one that just looks wide.

A Footnote in Ford’s Exotic Car Experiment

Ford would return to the mid-engine exotic conversation decades later with its own from-scratch GT program, but the Pantera years remain the company’s first real experiment selling a genuine mid-engine exotic through mainstream American dealerships. Cars like this one, wearing a modern homage to that later GT effort, tie those two chapters of Ford history together in a way that’s hard to find anywhere else in the brand’s lineup. Whether the builder intended it as a tribute or simply liked the shape, the result is a Pantera that references Ford’s past and future exotic ambitions in the same silhouette.

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