De Tomaso Mangusta

Begin with the animal, because the animal is doing something remarkable.

A mongoose is not immune to cobra venom in the way people casually claim. Its acetylcholine receptors are shaped slightly differently, which blunts the neurotoxin’s ability to bind — a partial resistance, not an exemption. What actually keeps a mongoose alive is speed, an erectile coat that makes it look twice its size, and a nervous system apparently unbothered by the entire situation. It wins by reflex and confidence. A large enough dose still kills it.

So the mongoose is not the cobra’s superior. The mongoose is the cobra’s specific, evolved, statistically favoured problem. That is a much more interesting relationship, and it is exactly the relationship the automotive world was in when this car appeared.

The legend — and the Ophidiary flags it as legend, loudly, in the provenance below — is this. Alejandro de Tomaso had been working with Carroll Shelby on a racing project. The project collapsed. De Tomaso, an Argentine of considerable temper operating out of Modena, then named his next road car the Mongoose, and every enthusiast for the following fifty-eight years has understood exactly what was meant by it.

Whether he said it out loud has never been established. It is repeated in every history of the marque. It is denied by nobody. It has the specific texture of a thing that is true in spirit and unprovable in fact, which is the texture of most of the good stories in motoring, and the Ophidiary would rather report the ambiguity than flatten it.

The car itself was drawn by Giorgetto Giugiaro at Ghia when he was in his twenties, and it is one of the most beautiful objects of the twentieth century. Long, flat, impossibly low — barely a metre and a hundred millimetres tall — with two gullwing panels over the engine and luggage bay that open like a beetle preparing to fly. A Ford V8 sat behind the driver in a steel backbone chassis.

It was also, by universal agreement, not very good. Weight distribution was somewhere around thirty-two per cent front and sixty-eight per cent rear, which is a figure normally associated with pendulums rather than cars. The chassis flexed. The brakes were optimistic. Driving one quickly required a specific negotiated understanding with the rear axle.

And so the mongoose named to insult the cobra turned out to be prettier and worse — which, if you have ever watched footage of the actual animal, is unfair to the mongoose, and which the Ophidiary suspects would have annoyed Alejandro de Tomaso considerably more than losing a race.

Four hundred and one were built. Then De Tomaso stopped fighting Shelby and built the Pantera instead, which was named after a cat, sold in far greater numbers, and settled nothing.