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Originally posted by garth66:
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its 2015 Ford Race Red. I'm still unsure about the bottom 1/2 black ?
Not the bottom half, just the portion below the doors.
Here are a couple with the bottom half painted:
Here's no paint on the lower rockers. Proportions look wrong; loses the sleek look; as Tom Tjaarda said, "The car looks like a big fat cat with it's belly dragging on the ground."
And here' one with the lower rockers correctly painted black. Note that the lower front valence is also black. The car looks much sleeker.
The difference is even more apparent on light cars (white, yellow, orange, etc.) when they don't have the lower rockers painted - they really look wrong! I find it surprising how many Panteras are missing this accent after a repaint... Lazy shops? Owners or painters not paying attention to detail?
This car is really difficult to mess around with because of the nature of the design. It has some many elements to it that will start to be reminiscent of other cars.
I think that there are those people that consider the blacked out rocker panels as some sort of a trick to reduce needless sheet metal work on them that will show if they continue with the body color.
For one thing, there are pinch welds there that will show with that color.
I think that in the second picture with the red rockers, the car looks like a 944? I don't care for that look. It's like a middle aged guy with a pot belly that is hanging over his jeans. It makes it look like it is overweight and needs to go on a crash diet?
I like the Group 4 color scheme of black below the witness line. This enables you to use 3m rocker shoots on them to help with the stone chips.
Porsche does that and Datsun (Nisan) does too on the Z cars.
The only problem I find with that is the "shoots" itself should be black in color rather than the tan color it comes in.
The other thing is people think you are covering up rust with it and also it is difficult to get a uniform "pebble" effect with the stuff.
I absolutely would add the single solid "race stripe" to that race car, up and over the roof and would leave the red highlights on the edges as I described. I don't like what the factory did on the rear deck with painting the sides of the decklid black.
There is no reason for that. It is very easy to leave that as body color and just paint the center section black since there is a nice hard border already provided in the sheet metal.
In fact, as I said previously, if you treat the blacked out areas on top as one large racing stripe and include the roof, you keep the integrity of the body color.
The thin black molding along the side of the car I see no purpose for. It turns into a "pin stripe" and is almost impossible to get it completely straight with no wiggles in it. It brings on an aesthetic confrontation for no reason, like an elephant trying to hide in a bowl of M&M's?
As far as separating the black form the red, look at what Hall did on "Big Red" with the yellow or gold pin stripes.
I feel that if you black out the Campi's, you loose the detail of the ins and outs of the design.
As "production" wheels go, they are pretty unique and if I did anything to them, I would go with polishing them out like the current aluminum billet wheels have done.
Another way to treat them is just to go to a very metal flaked silver with a very deep clear coat over them and just use black powder coated lugs.
I still haven't done the long racing wheel studs yet but the long racing lugs would be the way to go with them. I sent ARP all the details of the Pantera lugs 10 weeks ago and they still have not responded. I take that as a "we are not interested" non-response?
This is all getting very detailed and is getting to the point of is this a race car or a street car?
The 427 S/C Cobra is like that and I always envisioned this type of a Pantera as being very similar in that you are really driving a race car on the street, legally.
Mine has a/c. Not many race cars with that? Just leave a hose hanging from the a/c and tell everyone it is for your "cool suit"?
So really this red/black paint scheme is really making that kind of a statement? In addition it is tying the car to the factory race cars since that was their racing colors?
How many Ferari's or Lamborghini's can even consider doing that? The Pantera can.
