De Tomaso Guarà

De Tomaso
Front view of De Tomaso Guarà
Guarà
Production period:	1993-2004
Class :	Sports car
Body versions :	Coupé , convertible
Engines:	Petrol engines : 4.0-4.6 liters (210-224 kW)
Length:	4190 mm
Width:	2030 mm
Height:	1030-1200 mm
Wheelbase :	2610 mm
Empty weight :	1050-1400 kg
Previous model	Pantera

Rear view of the Guarà Coupé

De Tomaso Guarà Spyder

The De Tomaso Guarà was a sports car produced by the Italian car manufacturer De Tomaso . It was the last model to be sold under the De Tomaso name. The Guarà was presented at the Geneva Motor Show in 1993 as a Coupé and - much more noticed - as a Barchetta; later a cabriolet version was added. Initially, engines from BMW were used; From 1998 De Tomaso equipped the vehicles with engines from Ford . The Guarà was made in just 34 copies over a period of ten years; the considerable financial problems from which De Tomaso suffered since the early 1990s prevented the start of regular, secure production.

The concept

In the 1990s, the De Tomaso Guarà was to succeed De Tomaso Pantera , which was now more than 20 years old and which was only sold in a few copies in a second series that was presented in 1990 and was heavily revised. The initiative to develop De Tomaso Guarà goes back to company founder Alejandro de Tomaso ; However, after he suffered a stroke in February 1993, the project was brought to a conclusion under the direction of his son Santiago.

The De Tomaso Guarà was designed as a high-performance sports car with a mid-engine drive. It was a further development of the Maserati Barchetta , which Maserati had developed in 1991 - at the time still owned by Alejandro de Tomasos - primarily for competition purposes. Accordingly, the concept of the Guarà also revealed many influences from racing: plastic reinforced with glass or aramid fibers and other composite materials form the outer skin, which is stretched over a tubular frame. It rests - similar to De Tomaso's first street model, the Vallelunga - on a central tubular frame made of aluminum with which several subframes were connected. The construction of the frame largely corresponds to that of the Maserati Barchetta. On the chassis there were spring-damper elements on the inside, as in Formula 1 and Champ Car racing cars.

Body versions

Unlike the second series of the De Tomaso Pantera and unlike the last Maserati models of the De Tomaso era, the body of the Guarà was not designed by Marcello Gandini. The Turin designer Carlo Gaino was responsible for the design . He designed a low and emphatically rounded body of the vehicle. The front of the vehicle had pop-up headlights , and on the sides of the vehicle were large, conspicuous air inlets for the engine, which was located behind the driver's seats. The rear overhangs were kept tight; There was a large rear spoiler above the engine cover, which was integrated into the body. Three different body versions were derived from the basic design:

• The most common model was a two-seater coupé with a fixed roof. At the request of the customer and with the approval of the factory, three coupés were subsequently converted into Spyder by the Bastiglia- based body manufacturer Bacchelli & Villa , while a coupé completed in 2011 had a Targa roof.

• Even before the coupé, the Barchetta was presented, an uncompromisingly open vehicle for competitive use: it had no roof and the minimal windscreen only served the function of a wind deflector. The Barchetta was driven with a helmet. It was consistently geared towards lightweight construction. All convenience components have been removed.

• A third version was a Spyder , an open version with a fixed windshield. The soft top could be completely folded down. When open, the folded top was under a plastic cover behind the seats. This version could only be implemented with the BMW engines initially used. The Ford engines used from 1998 onwards were significantly larger and prevented the use of a convertible top compartment.

The drive technology

Initially, the Guarà models were powered by compact, powerful BMW engines. With this, De Tomaso turned away from the concept, which had been pursued for almost 30 years, of using large series engines from Ford. From 1998, however, De Tomaso returned to Ford engines. This change was primarily for economic reasons: The Ford engines were significantly larger and heavier and also less sophisticated than the BMW engines, but they only cost a third of the German engines.

BMW engines

Between 1993 and 1998 De Tomaso used BMW eight-cylinder engines of the type M60B40 . The engines had a displacement of 4.0 liters, had two overhead camshafts and four valves per cylinder. The power amounted to 286 hp; through changes to the engine management, the output could be increased to 304 hp. It is doubtful whether this version was actually delivered. The factory also announced an even more powerful version with an Alpina engine; but it was not realized. The engines were connected to a manual six-speed gearbox from Getrag , for which various gear ratios were available and, depending on the customer's wishes, enabled optimal acceleration values ​​or the highest possible speed.

The scope of production of the BMW Guaràs is unclear in detail; Most sources assume that 15 BMW-powered vehicles had been made by 1996, with three or four more being added by 1998.

Ford engines

From 1998 only Ford engines were used. The eight-cylinder engines were prepared by Visteon in Canada. They had a displacement of 4.6 liters, two overhead camshafts and four valves per cylinder and made 305 hp. In 2000 De Tomaso announced the development of a more powerful version with a turbocharger that would produce between 375 hp and 430 hp. The project was never realized due to lack of money.

In the course of the switch to Ford engines, the power transmission was also changed. The intermediate gear for positioning the BMW engine 13 cm lower was omitted. An extended main shaft was then mounted on the gearbox to bridge the distance to the engine.

The changes had an overall negative effect on the weight of the car: the Guarà equipped with Ford engines weighed 200 kg more than their predecessors with BMW engines. Together with a significantly higher center of gravity, which resulted from the greater height and weight, the Ford Guaràs were significantly less handy than the BMW models.

production

The first vehicles - mainly coupes - went on sale in 1994. Production was repeatedly interrupted in the following years. From 2000 only a few vehicles were produced; they had to be ordered individually at the factory and paid for in advance. Until 2005 the Guarà was available in Italy as well as in Switzerland and Austria on paper; in fact, regular production ended in 2004 when de Tomaso opened for bankruptcy. The last vehicle was commissioned in 2004, but was only completed as a coupé with Targa roof in 2011 during the ongoing insolvency proceedings and delivered to an Austrian customer.

An export to the USA, in which Alejandro de Tomaso initially had high hopes, never took place at the factory. De Tomaso's US importer received a vehicle without an engine and without a chassis number.

The production of the individual models is distributed as follows, disregarding subsequent conversions:

Body shape	BMW engine	Ford engine	total
Coupe	8th	13	21st
Barchetta	7th	3	10
Spyder	4th	-	4th
total	19th	16	35

literature

• Halwart Schrader, Georg Amtmann: Italian sports cars . Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-613-01988-4 .
• Lange, Hans-Karl: The quake is still rumbling . The end of De Tomaso. In: Oldtimer Markt, issue 8/2012, p. 50 ff.

Web links

Commons : De Tomaso  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Photos of De Tomaso Guarà
• Sales prospectus of De Tomaso Guarà from 1996.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Schrader, Amtmann: Italian Sports Cars, p. 107.
2. ↑ Model history on the website www.qv500.com ( Memento of the original from April 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Gandini, however, designed the De Tomaso Biguà a little later, which was presented in 1996 and sold under the name Qvale Mangusta from 1999 .
4. ↑ Model history on the website www.qv500.com ( Memento of the original from April 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ De Tomaso's first street sports car, the Vallelunga, used a four-cylinder Ford engine built in Great Britain; all later models, beginning with the De Tomaso Mangusta , used American or Australian eight-cylinder engines from Ford.
6. ↑ Model history on the website www.qv500.com ( Memento of the original from January 27, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ^ Schrader, Amtmann: Italian Sports Cars, p. 107.
8. ↑ Model history on the website www.qv500.com ( Memento of the original from January 27, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
9. ↑ Model history on the website www.qv500.com ( Memento of the original from January 27, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
10. ↑ Oldtimer Markt, issue 8/2012, p. 53.