Original wheels and tyres.

Notes on the many posts in this thread:

On bigger tires for the Mangusta, remember the bare chassis on display at Geneva '65 had 8" x 15" front wheels and 10 x 15" rears- no tires. There were 15" Goodyear Blue Streak racing tires back in the day that would fit them. Knowing DeTomaso never threw anything away when he could sell it to someone, that race chassis may have become a '65-'66 Mangusta.

10x 15" rear wheels also showed up on the restored version of the one-off Mangusta Spyder #8MA0912 back when Steve Nanny owned it. Also heard a rumor that a second Spyder was found in Portugal awhile back. No photos so dunno what wheels THAT one carried or what serial it has- if its even real.

I have a record of #8MA1302 as a right hand drive car somewhere in OZ, from a few years back but no owner listed. That should be car #402 as Steve said. A bunch of us got into the storage unit during the factory visit 1996, and there were at least 5 sets of front and rear Mangusta body-clips stacked on top of each other. Certainly wouldn't be impossible to fabricate a 'few' continuation cars from left-overs.

...there was this car--and I assume at one time, it was a genuine car (since it had the 'factory' skid plate. At least, the skid plate survived (!)). Provamo shows a second spider (with 8ma512 so unique, with the very early lancia side marker lights and a kind of channel at the belt line)...

Lee,

Quite the job of trimming off the "Goose" from the bones.......!   Would liked to have seen more pic's of the "leftovers"!

Steve

Steve, on the Blue Goose, I remember your maybe-factory spare tire had a sidewall marked 'Blem'. Talk about the factory saving a buck....

@mangusta posted:

Lee,

Quite the job of trimming off the "Goose" from the bones.......!   Would liked to have seen more pic's of the "leftovers"!

Steve

Steve, the surprise is--there is a whole car for that chassis, 8ma968...probably a "ran when parked, wanted to restore it and then had a kid" stories...But honestly,  a car that probably should come back to life some day... See as 8ma968 and also "unknown 1541" on Provamo--Lee

I think the tire subject is another typical De Tomaso rabbit hole.  To add to it:

I have a brownline print, that came from Ford Design, that came from GHIA.

It is 1/10 scale. It is the four views of the Mangusta PRODUCTION car. Not the show car and it was signed by Giugiaro. Dated August 10, 1964.  The show car was shown with the chassis later in October at the Turin show. The production car, like mine, has very large wheel tubs for, wide race tires?

The side view drawing shows the tire size on the tires. 225X15X70 on the rear and 185X70X15 on the front. Tire information and ground height is some of the essential information required to start the drawing.

I sent two copies of the drawing to Giugiaro, one for him and one for his signature to be returned to me.  They didn't read that part of my message

So I never got the return copy.

When I saw his son Fabrizzio the following January at the NAIAS he said that his dad framed it and put it on his office wall.

I would like to put better tires on my car but the 275X15X60 rears and the 235X60X15 fronts look very good on the car, fill the wheelwells in the rear and give me good road clearance. They are very good tires.

As I said I wish they rode better but that is the problem of the Michigan roads not the tires.

Regarding the speed rating, I am done driving the car over 140.  

1959, while in college I put a small block in my MGTD and after getting it running my dad worried about the tires. He sent me to a tire store  and I had them put 670X15X70 Something on the car, same size as the current Corvette. I went right out and drove it about 140.

The bill, for 4 tires installed and balanced was something like $16.50.

He got a discount.  Scary.

Dick Ruzzin

Dick, sounds like you owe your dad $16.50...he probably kept you alive (!)  When did you get the drawing? And esp, why did Ghia give a copy to Ford? Amazing that you ended up later with the car... Lee

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

We've recently purchased these Pirelli tyres for our restoration. They look great, nice and period and a welcome change from the Michelin XWX. once they're on the car I'll get some pictures up.

Pleaselet us know how they ride.

Dick Ruzzin

What sizes are they and overall diameter of both.  This would be very helpful to all.

@dickruzzin posted:

What sizes are they and overall diameter of both.  This would be very helpful to all.

205/70/15 front, 255/60/15 rear.

I do not know the diameter of the 255s but I think you will be a little shy on diameter which will lower the back of the car, and your bell housing. I think my 265 X 60 series tires are a hair smaller than the originals.

If  you do not need to have a Euro tire on your car......and to go thru all the gyrations of trying to find a (I'm not sure what?) set of tires......

You can go old school BFGoodrich or similar....  Fronts 215-60/15 and Rear 275-60/15 and be done with all of this chatter...... rated for at least 100mph....and good longevity out of them providing you do not dork up your front wheel alignment by changing shock settings (or just about anything else...like installing alloy heads & intake on your engine....losing 50lbs due to Covid!)  after you have the alignment shop work done!!!

These tires fill out the wheel wells perfectly......

Cheers!
Steve

Steve,

I tried 225s on the front and did not like the road feel  at all.

Your car looks like it is sitting low, what is your bell-housing clearance?

I would guess 3 1/2 inches.

Dick,

The 215's rub the inner trunk panel on full lock LH turn I believe....could be one car to another variances....  and I figured 225's would be more problems..... No need for them.

Since I was missing about 3/8" of the bottom of my bellhousing I had a tad more clearance than normal!!!!  But 3-1/2 is pretty close...I thought I had under car pic's somewhere....couldn't locate them.....

The beach pic was taken in 2012, after my engine swap/ZF/frame rebuild plus associated bits and pieces....front shocks in there somewhere also.  I believe that I went in for one more front suspension change, which involved raising the front end just a tad from what is seen in the pic's, and because of alignment issues associated (unbeknownst to me!!!) with the prior changes we needed a new set of shoes up front once again!!!

It's almost like if you take on a large passenger you're threatening your expensive alignment $$$s!  Tire$!!!    As Johnny Woods pointed out, the front end on these cars is pretty darned dynamic..... all you can hope for is "getting it close" and stocking up on front rubbers if you do a LOT of driving....which we did.  Then DON'T TOUCH IT!          On the other hand, the rear tires wore extremely light over the same time frame..... of course bad ball joints up front didn't do the car any good either.....

Was nice driving, comfortable car!!!!

Steve

STEVE,

The original front tire section is very round, remember those 80 series tires? Originally 70s on the Mangusta, very round.. Also tire sections changed away from fuel economy toward handling, more rubber on the road. So they went from round to more square. Later they kept the wide section but were able to help the fuel economy with tread design and compound adjustments.

Every modern section tire will rub the wheel house inner at the back, doesn't matter the size.

Dick Ruzzin

Just an update on these tyres - look, and feel great. only issue we had was the fronts caught the front lower valance, and needed the wishbones spacing as far back as possible, and a touch of caster needed by adjusting the frontmost upper wishbone joint.

This has been a wonderful subject, probably the most important one. Had my suspension aligned by a great guy on a modern machine about five years ago. It tracks and brakes straight and true still.  Wonderful.

My Goodyears are about five years old so I am ready for new tires and love what I see here on the Pirellis. Looked at the site and they recommend a 255 rear which sounds good for me. When I get my car back from the National Corvette Museum in December I will start looking at it seriously.

Does anyone know the Pirelli load rating and how they ride? That is the big problem with the BF G's for me.

Thanks everyone for a great discussion so far.

DICK RUZZIN

Hi Dick, assuming the Pirelli's are CN12's,  the load rating for front is 90 (= 600kgs / 1323 lbs) and rears are 102 (850 kg / 1874 lbs). W speed rating = 168mph.
I'm using 275/55 Avons CRZZ's on rear which fill out the arch nicely, they have slightly high load rating (104) but also slightly lower speed rating (V = 149 mph). Good grip, pretty soft tyre.

Cheers

Larry Tucker