Classic Cars: De Tomaso Guará

In the declining years of De Tomaso, when the company founded by the Argentine Alejandro de Tomaso was no longer even a shadow of what it had been, it was decided to build a sports car that was an adaptation of the Maserati Barchetta Stradale, a car that Maserati had kept as a prototype since 1991. De Tomaso’s association with Maserati was nothing new; De Tomaso had prevented Maserati from being liquidated a few years earlier, so the link between the two brands had grown ever stronger.

Yet new times were arriving in the industry. Sports cars were no longer attracting enough buyers, unless they were Ferrari or Lamborghini, and European fuel economy and emissions policies were beginning to gain more and more importance. De Tomaso’s own health was deteriorating, and his Modena factory was only building units to order, which did not bode well. The Guará was to be the last car built at the De Tomaso facilities and the least known model of the brand.

For the final design of the Guará, the services of Carlo Gaino were employed, an independent designer who had collaborated on the design of the Maserati Barchetta. Gaino wanted the car to be cutting-edge, so he did not hesitate to include pushrod suspension (at that time used only in Formula 1), along with a carbon fibre and Kevlar body. The first examples, built from 1993 to 1998, were powered by a 4-litre V8 engine of BMW mounted in the mid-rear position. It was the first time in its history that De Tomaso had abandoned Ford engines. Equipped with a 6-speed manual gearbox and weighing only 1,200 kilos, the Guará could accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in 4.8 seconds and reach a top speed of 270 km/h.

In 1998 De Tomaso set aside BMW engines and returned to its roots, equipping its only production model with a V8 of Ford. The 4.6-litre unit from the Ford Mustang Cobra began to be used in the Guará, an engine heavier but with the same power output as the German block and at a much lower cost.

The Guará was offered in three distinct variants, coupé, spider and barchetta. But despite offering a variant for every customer, it did not achieve the expected success. De Tomaso only managed to sell between 40 and 60 units (the exact number is unknown) from 1996 to 2004, the year the company went into liquidation. Its lines did not make it the most beautiful car, nor the most practical, as it was a two-seater that did not even have a boot. It was simply one more car, built to race in a world that was no longer the same as the days of the marvellous De Tomaso Pantera or Mangusta.

Source | Wikipedia, Classic Driver, Super Car World