Reply to "Guara Barchetta for sale on eBay"

For those of you who are longtime POCA members and keep the old issues, Mike Drew wrote a great article about his test drive of them in issue 2001 #2. I suggest you go and read it. Here's what I wrote about his article In my "Ten Years Ago" article:

"The front cover of Profiles 2001 #2 is the blue 2001 De Tomaso Guara, set against the Italian countryside, that was the centerfold "De Tomaso of the Quarter". The Guara, for those who don't know or have forgotten, was introduced in 1994 as a new clean sheet design with which De Tomaso intended to "re-establish his company as a maker of cutting-edge cars." As Mike Drew wrote, it was "Designed to compete in the marketplace with the likes of the Ferrari F-355 and the Porsche 911 Turbo, the Guara represents the high-water mark of De Tomaso engineering achievement." About the time Mike wrote this article, I was doing my Pantera restoration (to be discussed in issue 2001 #3) and I saw the car in the flesh at Steve Wilkinson's shop (Steve had one of two in the US at the time) and (as a Mechanical Engineer) was blown away by the sophistication of the design. In the article Mike was equally blown away by the way the car(s) drives (he drove both the coupe and Barchetta versions). While the Guara was not the most aesthetic of De Tomaso's cars it was clearly the most sophisticated. Sadly, only about 50 of the cars were produced and only two made it to the US."