So I attended the Chesapeake Pantera Fall Picnic this past Saturday, hosted by Ron McCall at his shop in Hampstead, MD. What an incredibly fun time and a great turnout by fellow Pantera owners. But my visit produced a comment/observation that has me perplexed. I own a '72 European Pantera, chassis number 2778, verified by Marti Report that it is European and not sold in the U.S. as part of the Ford/Mercury program. Also, verified by the original owner who brought it over from Italy. (Just a couple of weeks ago I found a 500 lire coin in the driver's side seat rail, which was kind of neat. It must have been placed in there on purpose, because I cannot see how the coin could possibly fit inside the seat rail by the rollers. The coin is too large to have fit through any openings.) As mentioned in another post, my car was converted to the GTS-5 wide-body back in the early 80's by Roy Waine in St. Albans, VT. On Saturday, one attendee told me that someone had to have done a lot of work on my Pantera to convert the license plate opening to the European longer and narrower opening, because none of the Pantera's had a European license plate opening until 1981, and that all these cars had the U.S. small opening up until 1981. (Another thread on this Forum actually states the year was 1979.) There is no visible signs that mine had been cut and reshaped, so if Roy Waine had done it, he did a FANTASTIC job of it. So I just called Roy Waine to verify this. He recalled vividly that he did not cut the back end of my car, and that he had received the stock GTS bodied car with the wide license plate opening. He said during the conversion to the GTS-5 body, he had stripped down the car to bare metal, and there was no sign of any welding/body work anywhere on the car, including the license plate area. He recalls it was all original metal. Yes, I realize memories can and will fade, but he was really sure that he did not cut or change anything in the rear of the car. Based on what I was told at the picnic and what I have read on other posts on this Forum, how can that be? How could mine have had the wide plate opening when folks definitively state there was none until years later? Any help to clear this up for me would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance.
Fuzz
