I’ll focus on the aspects of the tour that were perhaps unique to me. All the great people, the sights, French waiters and tons of food, I’m sure somebody else will describe better...
For this trip things sorted itself out so that I drove my Pantera with my wife. Last year in Modena was with a friend in the Longchamp. Not sure that my wife read this Forum, so I’ll try to keep comments clean, but it’s fair to say that my wife is not one for too fast driving. When I go power boating with her, I refer to her as my anchor. But a great wife...
Our trip to the start of the meeting was a 2-day trip of approx 1000 miles. My Pantera has two unique points, one that made the trip a bit harder, and one that absolutely saved the trip. First is that it has practically no mufflers, and between 110-120 km/t it has a sonic boom in the cabin that’s quite unpleasant. So I of course had to drive faster, if we had gone below 110, we would never get there. My wife and I didn’t talk much during the trip, we couldn’t...
The second unique point is a functioning A/C. What a blessing. With 33C-in-the-shade days and a huge heat generator right behind you, who can live (well) without it? A short soapbox talk: If you want to reduce weight and go racing every weekend, rip out the A/C. But if not, get it to work…Trip Denmark to Northern France: We had a stop in front of a bicycle shop. Three youngsters employed there stopped working and looked at the Pantera. I thought, here it comes. And yes, first guy: “Look, a Ferrari”. Hhhmmmm. Second guy:”It’s Testarossa”. Oh no, that’s just about the most insulting thing he could say. But then the third guy said:”No, it’s a DeTomaso Pantera. The Porsche killer!” Maybe the next generation isn’t that bad...
So how did the Pantera do on the trip? With the wife-rev limiter in the car we didn’t go above 155 km/t, pure cruising. When we got to Hamburg we got in 90 minute stop and go traffic. And not just any day: I almost never use the radio in the Pantera for obvious reasons, but when stopped it the queue I tried to get information about the length of the queue as the water gauge crept towards the right and my clutch leg got painful. There was no news about the queue, but they did say it was the hottest day of the year. Of course... Well the many improvements I’ve made to the cooling system ended up keeping us out of trouble. And the A/C, I wouldn’t say it kept us freezing, but it helped a lot. So we got through.
Next incident was like out of a bad movie. Looking for a hotel the first night I had to turn the car around in a city street. I turned into a small alley planning to sit there until traffic cleared, and then back out and go in the opposite direction. That was the plan. But when I turned into the alley, I saw it was being paved, fresh asphalt being poured from a truck 10 meters down the alley. Two workers were standing waiting for the truck to dump its load of asphalt. And the truck was backing towards me! So if I didn’t move, I’d soon have asphalt on the front of the car. Pretty surreal scenario. None of the workers seemed to have any intentions of stopping the guy in the truck, maybe they were looking forward to it... When the truck was 2 meters from the Pantera’s nose, there was a hole in the traffic, and I backed out on the city street and got away. Scary.
The next hotel we got to had a wedding reception going on in front of it, with pictures being taken of the bride being carried by the groom etc.. But when we pulled up, including the open exhausts, a few of the male guest disregarded the wedding and came over to ask about the car. I pitied the guests, in very nice clothes on a still extremely hot day.
The next day we left Germany, passed through Holland and Belgium into France. Belgium, what’s wrong with that country? Any motorway I’ve driven through that country is lousy, as you reach France or Holland, it’s a different world of new straight asphalt. In Belgium they don’t repair their motorways, they just lower the speed limits…
We arrived at the hotel 1½ hour before dinner, so perfect. The parking lot was full of interesting Panteras and people, some we knew already but also a lot of new faces. Hellos all around.
I won’t go into all the hotels and sights and dinners. Only the Hotel de France because of its racing history. Being close to Le Mans, it’s been used by teams for many years, and the walls are literally full of pictures of cars and drivers, primarily from 50-90s. Nice parking outside in town center, Panteras, Longchamp, Bentley, Aston Martin, MGB, Ford GT, etc..
A special mention of the French country roads and what we did to them
. Driving as a group of enthusiasts in powerful cars from one place to another, we got a little carried away. 90 km/t is the speed limit, but we were traffic permitting at 120-130. And that was just great. I really felt that this is what these cars are built for. Stretching out on straight two-lane blacktops, overtaking the locals, getting where you need to go fast. The scenery, the speed, the noise, the weather, DeTomasos in front of me and behind me. Just great, worth the whole trip. I won’t tell my top speed, but I would never drive like that at home… While driving at great speed I suddenly saw a motorcycle cop coming against me, pointing for me to go to the far right of the road, so I thought that this was going to be expensive. But he drove on, and shortly after I saw why he had done it, a giant truck with a catamaran used up a lot of space. Phew. But others were not as lucky. Two members of the group were radared and stopped for speeding, one measured at 142km/t, the other 131 km/t. The fastest was told that his car would be confiscated and his license too. Fortunately he had the skill that gives goodwill all over that not very international not very global country: He spoke French. And after approx 1 hour of “negotiating”, he got off with a €90 fine. 
€90, that’s what it costs in my country just to think about speeding. When the two unlucky/lucky cars arrived at the bar where the rest of us had been sitting drinking, worrying about them, they were of course treated as heroes.But enough about the outside world, we finally got to Le Mans. Here we (meaning I) started to erect the tent in blistering 33C (in the shade that was non-existent). And then someone that was part of our group but had gone directly to Le Mans in a camper came and offered me a cold beer! Best f….. beer I ever had. I hope that you know Le Mans, if you’ve never been there, go, it’s one of the places you must come to before you die.
Saturday morning it was time to do laps. In my naivety I had imagined 5 Panteras on the track and a pacecar maybe. But we were let out 200 cars at a time! I found myself in the middle of a group of 15-20 Austin Healeys, and they seemed more interested in filming the spouse on Mulsanne Straight than following the race line, so progress was slow. I did manage to get ahead of that group, and started to go faster and faster. I overtook lots of cars, were overtaken by a few, mostly TVRs driving like they had in fact come to Le Mans to die… Of the cars I overtook, I remember most fondly a modern Mustang and a Jag XK, took the corner faster and accelerated past them
. The Pantera handled itself great, no scary moments, no overheating, no lack of power. It did use quite a bit of fuel strangely enough.
Driving home to Denmark was uneventful. Nice French motorways, lousy Belgium motorways, super Dutch motorways, fast German motorways, and slow Danish motorways. We stopped for the night in Holland, where I watched the World Cup Final in the bar, where for some reason half the viewers were Spanish. Quite lively…
So all in all, a great trip, 4330 km. A bit far to drive, next time will probably be in the Longchamp, the continent cruiser….
