I already had the Mangusta for several years. A good friend who was a designer at Ford called me one Saturday morning and said that another Ford designer had retired and was moving to Florida. He was having a garage sale and he was sure that I would like to have it. I said absolutely and he bought it for me.
It is a brownline copy of a mechanical drawing on a little sheet, 1/10th scale with a GHIA title block in the lower right corner. The date and Giugiaro's signature are there. It is the drawing of the production version of the car. I think that the interior was done at that time. Tom Jaarda told me that Giorgetto did both the exterior and interior. The Chief Designer at Bertone worked with him at GHIA and told me that hed did the car at home on his kitchen table.
I can only speculate that when de Tomaso approached Ford for engines it led to the idea that Ford Design would redo the car. That would have been a dumb idea but it was clear when they modified the Mangusta for Gene Bordinate that they did not understand the design.
Who knows, but the drawng was there. It's interesting for me to evaluate the drawing as I can see the changes that were made from the original design and there are many. The production version I am quite sure is narrower. With de Tomaso fitting the racing chassis under it resulting in foundational changes. The sheer walls had to be set up along side the engine first. The original design was probably set up aroind a Chevrolet engine as Giugiaro would have had that information from his previous work on the Bizzarrini sedan.
Some changes were made also I am sure as he saw the first car being built or the first time. Of note is that the drawing shows the front leading edge of the hood to have a rising crown, this was changed to a straight horizontal line which makes the front look quite aggressive, You can see the change was late as the leading edge of the hood is simply bent down, a brilliant solution to the problem.
The upper corners of the grill opening are shown as rounded so that it looked like a previous small two passenger open car. Pompero is the only name that I can recall. Giugiaro evolved his designs, car to car. It was the only way that he could do so many so quickly, rarely stepping away and doing something completely different. The Strada is one.
You can see the Mangusta design and form language lineage starting way back, actually in the first Alfa Romeo coupe that was done at Bertone when he started there. It was very basic as he created an accent in the center of a section rather than at the end, No other designer did that. Continuing on in the FIAT 850, the iso Grifo, etc. And there is no doubt that the Miura was a Giugiaro design to start with. His signature form language and many details clearly show that. The rear drive FIAT Kangaroo, done two years earlier, was also a race car for the street, like the Mangusta.
I cover all of this in my book and much more, including my copies of the side and plan view of the Mangusta.I di all four views but did not use two of them. I re-did them as design sketches so that I would not have to wait eternally for permission to use the drawing.
DICK RUZZIN