An Autokraft Mk IV Cobra roadster sounded like a good enough cover car for a nearly bankrupt sports car magazine that had a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving the next few months. And, as I was preparing to load the Ryder rental truck and move the magazine from Atlanta to California, it would have to do. The Autokraft was listed in the back pages of what had become, to some extent, my magazine, and the Autokraft’s owner was local. I called the owner, we chatted, he was excited and agreeable, even offered to round up a real 289 Cobra just out of restoration. We set a date, and I went back to packing boxes. Name of the Autokraft owner? Danny Panoz.

Photographer in tow, I turned up at what would become Chateau Elan, but which then was a field of dank, slippery Georgia clay, with a block-and-concrete warehouse at one end and the beginnings of a grand chateau at the other. The Cobras were lined up. Yeah, OK, nice cars, but what a rough location, with clay smeared all over the temporary asphalt road, stickers still on the 289’s tires, soggy grass, and a couple of fiercely ugly buildings for a backdrop. Oh, boy, this is going to make for a scintillating cover.

But after the photo shoot and a brief drive, Danny invited me to his home, which was built against a knoll towards the back of the property. We ate, talked about sports cars, I met his wife and children, and he showed me sketches and tiny models made of toothpicks and glue of a miniature Group C car he had dreamed up, to be powered by a 1-liter motorcycle engine. This, in the early days of 1988, was a Gordon Murray Rocket Group C car, and this guy living in north Georgia wanted to build it.

Danny was and remains to this day a chain-smoking bundle of muscle and nervous energy: frantic, hyper-active, intense, prone to over-acting when telling stories—and at the time a true aficionado of Harvey’s Bristol Crème, which he drank in large quantities that night. Still, I was the editor of a nearly dead sports car magazine, he wanted to make sports cars but didn’t know anyone in the car business, and it all seemed like a good time.

Danny phoned back a few days later to ask if I wanted a proper drive in the car. Of course, I agreed. I didn’t bother telling him that until I became the spin champion at the Brumos Porsche Super School at Roebling Road and had scared the piss out of myself on a Toyota launch near Mid-Ohio featuring the then-new Supra Turbo, I hadn’t driven anything much more potent than my cobbled-together Alfa Giulietta. But, what the hell, you gotta start some time.

Early morning, and Danny had the car polished to perfection. I drove up in the Supercharged MR2 that Toyota had kindly arranged as my new year-long loaner, and met the cast. Donal Guinnee, chief bean counter for dad’s modest company, Elan Pharmaceuticals. And a friendly country boy, Jeff Gibson, who would be my navigator as we coursed through the mountains. Properly bundled up against the weather—late January, north Georgia, with snow and ice on the roads in some places—we took off in the Autokraft, top down. Danny and the bean counter followed in the MR2.

The day was blissful, and the conditions lent themselves to a good Ewing performance at the wheel. No test track, just a long day in the saddle, enjoying excellent roads. Going into a lefthander on the backside of the mountains, we hit a sheet of black ice, something I had never encountered in my life as a Southern California boy. Luck factored into events as we slid straight for the side of the mountain: we hopped off the ice sheet in time for me to save the car and myself.  I learned an important lesson: treat driving just like everything else in life—don’t worry about it—and it all turns out fairly well.

A week later, I was driving a Ryder Rental truck cross-country with a surly art director riding shotgun. We stopped off in Dallas to drive a Bonneville car built by Bob Norwood that combined a knock-off Ferrari 288 GTO body and frame with a Chevy Can-Am motor.

But a story about a production antique sports car driven through the mountains of North Georgia would not be Danny’s last contribution to the sports car world, as all of you know. We kept in touch, and one day Danny called at our hole-in-the-wall office in Newport. He asked if I had ever heard of the Costin sports car.

“We just ran a story on that car. It’s hideous. What of it?”

”The car, it’s made in Ireland. The Thompsons are in receivership. I can buy the whole thing cheap. It’s like a Lotus 7, only better. They win all kinds of races.”

“Danny, why would you want to get involved with that?”

”Bring it over, make a car.”

“You’ll ruin your life.”

No word for weeks. Then another call. ”I bought it. I’m shipping everything over to Georgia.”

On a trip to Georgia a few weeks later, I walked through the remains of the Thompson Car Company. Danny had set up shop in a rusty, broken-down shed. Literally. I suspect possums and skunks lived in it during winter to avoid the cold. A truly wretched hole. And there lay all the spare parts and jigs for creating the ugliest hunchbacked piece of shit ever known to the sports car world, the TMC Costin.

Ambitions were modest at first: redesign the nose a bit, maybe figure out how to make a true roadster of it, produce it as a kit car, and sell it cheap. Danny was talking to NASCAR suppliers about sectioning and widening the body, and modifying the molds.

The sequence of events sped up, as they so often do with Danny. He called again and the topic of designers came up. Danny was and remains hyper-kinetic, so I recommended he work with my magazine’s young design critic, one Freeman Thomas, an equally wild individual, possessed by intense demons. Colored markers in hand, Freeman would enter what his wife called “design coma.” She once said Freeman stared right through her and said, “Blue. What a cool color,” like some beatnik poet with a set of bongo drums. I’m thankful for the time I spent working with Freeman—through him and photographer Dave Gooley I ended up working with the late Strother MacMinn of Art Center—and I admire and greatly respect Freeman’s creative powers. Simple fact is, I love Freeman for his abilities and the fact that he still has the wonder of a child. But he is one wacky dude.

Freeman Thomas with his first Art Center class.

After both got their panties in a knot over missed phone calls, followed by matchmaking phone calls on my part that patched things back together, Freeman and Danny finally connected as I’d hoped. Freeman took direction from Danny over the phone and started sketching. By the second or third fax, Danny saw what he wanted: a mix of Lotus 7, 427 Cobra, and Kurtis 500, with twin mouths like the World War Two fighters Danny loved learning about on the Discovery Channel program “Wings.” Rendered in vivid blue, Freeman’s bug-eyed roadster wasn’t all bad. I wrote my column about it, and published this first and for the most part definitive sketch of the Panoz roadster.

The first Freeman Thomas sketch of what would become the Panoz AIV Roadster.

Inspired by the sketch, Danny hurtled forward, a cloud of cigarette smoke trailing. Which leads to an aside. Anyone who has spent time around Danny knows he’s a bit like Gomez Addams, eyes bugging out when he has a fresh idea. Better still, he’ll use any heated device to light his cigarettes. He’ll start by patting his chest pockets, then work his way down to the pants. If he can’t find matches or a lighter, he’ll stick his face into a hot toaster, a stove-top burner, an acetylene torch, anything that can spark up a cigarette. All of this is done while he continues to hold court on the subject, whether it’s the next tweak to the suspension or a favorite scene from the original Star Trek TV series.

I could feel the energy over the phone. Danny was heading to California to create an all-new body for the car. Oh, and he’d be making good on earlier talk about dropping in a 225 horsepower Mustang GT drivetrain, so he needed to carry out a cheap sectioning job on the Costin’s brilliantly simple tube chassis. Gotta make it wider, he said. Well, OK, Danny. I’ll buy you a beer upon arrival was my reply.

At the time, the Miata was brand-new to the market. I had one to test for my magazine, and Danny was amazed by it. He wanted to build a car that anyone could afford, to build a performance legend. He thought Porsche and Ferrari were off-target, building over-priced cars that only rich poseurs could afford. He wanted to put performance within reach of the multitude. When riding in the Miata, he’d grow despondent, and began doubting the sanity of his venture. If a mainstream carmaker can build a cheap sports car this good, Danny would say, then what can I hope to accomplish?

Over time, Danny’s dream moved from one end of the spectrum—building a cheap kit car—to the distant opposite of making a hand-built alloy-bodied car only the most prosperous could hope to own.

An intriguing character came with the remains of the Thompson Motorcar Company: Mick (yes, Mick), the Irish fabricator. Mick, who might have won a part in Disney’s “Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” could down a gallon of Guinness or more on a nightly basis, consuming all his wages and keeping him in a penniless state—and leaving little room in his gullet for more than a dab of fast food to soak up the alcohol. Mick might sound like a crude stereotype of a drunken Irishman, but he played an important role. Not only did he have institutional knowledge of the Costin, how it performed, why it handled so well, and how to fabricate any piece that might be necessary, but Mick was the sort of guy Danny needed at his side. Tonto and the Lone Ranger? Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza? Comfortable clichés for those who’ve never been there. Mick was something more than Tonto because Mick never paused to think something wasn’t possible, even if he was horrified by the idea of a V8. He simply did it.

Mick was also highly entertaining, a lovable character. On a visit to the beach, Danny and Mick were harassed by a foul-natured child. Mick went over to the water’s edge, looked for bubbles, dug up a handful of white sand crabs, walked over to the kid, stuffed them in his mouth, then spit them one by one at the kid, who left screaming and crying. All the while Mick wore a hanky on his head to keep the sun off his pink scalp. Though he was never entirely sold on the idea of a V8 in the Costin, Mick was all right, and a worthy splash of color on the early Panoz canvas.

Freeman and Danny had their problems all along, but Danny rolled with the opportunities. Freeman was working freelance for Harm LaGaay of Style Porsche, designing forklifts for a client of Porsche Engineering, working for me (I had to write a letter to the bank to get him a home loan because the bank didn’t care about his lucrative work with Porsche, if you can believe that), and he was also teaching an introductory car design class at Art Center. So Freeman knew the resources in Southern California. He found clay modelers, and an Orange County studio with a bit of open space on the cheap. As I recall, the space was arranged through Tom Kellogg, the guy who designed the Studebaker Avanti for Loewy’s studio. The studio was occupied by an industrial designer and his son. They were both decent fellows and the son had an overpowered VW caravan. Danny got the back corner of their industrial workspace.

I had an Austin Healey at the time, in spite of the fact I’m six foot three. I visited the day Danny and Mick had finished widening the tube frame to accept the Ford drivetrain. The frame with wheels was sitting on an armature and a modeler was prepping the clay. They had rigged up a seat in the tube frame, and a wooden box to represent the V8. They sat me in the car. Accustomed as I was to the cramped space of the Healey, I thought the Panoz most luxurious by comparison. Big mistake. The car ended up too narrow, but thankfully the manufacturing process adopted later for the alloy body panels allowed Danny to make the car several inches wider once the mistake became obvious. This is why real manufacturers build multiple bucks and digitize the bodies to ensure real people can fit inside. I had no idea, as this was the first time in my life I was near the creation of a vehicle, short of the bizarre BMW-powered Formula Three car my father and a few friends built in the garage, never quite finished, and eventually made into a play set for my brother and I. In my work at Ford Special Vehicle Team and in Hiroshima on the study to validate a relaunch of Mazdaspeed and the “Mazda Performance Series,” I learned what it really takes to make a car, or at least as much as a non-engineer can learn. But at the time, Freeman Thomas knew more than the rest of us—and he was a relatively inexperienced designer.

Another big change took place on this same visit. The TMC Costin had long leading arms to locate the live axle. TMC ran a Ford four cylinder, as the Costin was in essence an evolution of the Lotus 7 concept. Danny wanted a car with a tight, round, appealing bottom—and I choose those words intentionally. Danny wanted a curvaceous car with sexual overtones. To achieve that, Mick cut the boxy rear of the frame down and greatly shortened the leading arms. This was pure guesswork, as Danny had no budget to build a development buck and find out if this suspension mod would work. The body would be designed and finished before he could prove his theory. Thankfully, Mick had a good sense about the car and knew just how much of the hideous, boxy rear end could be bobbed. As it turned out, the rear suspension was never the problem with the Panoz. It was the front end and steering that proved difficult to sort.

The clay work moved along quickly, but time ran out at the first studio, so the whole wad of clay was loaded up in a truck and shipped to a small warehouse space, further south in Laguna. Danny was running out of cash and started sleeping in a corner of the rented warehouse space, whittling on the stock of a rifled musket he was building from a kit. There was hardly room enough to move, but the car was soon completed. You have to admire a determined man.

To help out in this difficult period, I met with Danny several times a week, almost always at Muldoon’s on Fashion Island in Newport Beach. Owned by a New York lawyer, Muldoon’s was staffed by some of the surliest Irish women I’ve ever come across—and my Grandmother Ewing was from Galway, so I’ve known more than a few surly Irish women. The same meal every time, without fail: Mrs. Murphy’s Pot Roast, soda bread, volumes of beer. I would describe in great detail the cottage “factories” I’d seen, MVS of Le Mans in particular, which had captured my imagination even if I found the MVS Venturi a grave disappointment as a sporting car. The production method distilled to a simple concept: job out all major sub-assemblies, and have a simple, clean place to bring them together. Call it manufacturing by mail order, or Fed Ex. That’s exactly what Danny went on to create and in many ways perfect.

I can’t remember who brought it up first, but Danny and I were and are both fascinated with airplanes and the advanced technology used in their creation. As it was used to form exterior panels for jet fighters prior to the F-22 Raptor’s arrival, vacuum-forming became a hot topic of debate over Mrs. Murphy’s pot roast and soda bread. I asked around in the business to gauge the success Aston had with vacuum-forming. Not too good. Still, as Danny’s plans evolved past knocking out a cheap kit car to making a real car, aluminum seemed advisable for its cachet, and vacuum-forming fit his evolving production model. It would also lend the car a unique marketing opportunity: the sports car with fighter plane body panels.

During this period, Danny started playing with logos, creating the early iterations of the Panoz logo we know today. I guess when you’re living like a hobo in a rented storage garage, bathing with a towel and sponge in a sink, and sleeping on the floor, you’ve got time to think. I thought he should name the car the Claymore, with a big sword splitting the center of the badge, a grand phallus, but Danny wanted his name on it, and he liked the combination of red, white and blue with an Irish shamrock. He also argued that Claymore would bring up images of exploding mines, not swords.

Danny was determined to use Ford mechanicals due to The Company’s long history of cooperation with specialist firms. I was invited by John Clinard, Ford’s western PR guy, to a lunch at Claremont College with Don Petersen, then CEO of Ford. At the time, no one knew of Danny’s work. Anyone who did listen to me concluded I was insane and so was this hillbilly from Georgia. I told Danny to put together a portfolio. He was hesitant, as presenting to the CEO of Ford would mean he was serious and had damn well follow through. He kept trying to wriggle out, but I wouldn’t let him. I had a lot of fun working on his insecurities and pushing him along, all in a good-natured way, of course. Danny put together the portfolio at Kinko’s. At the close of the Ford lunch at Claremont, I handed the portfolio to Petersen’s assistant, a middle-aged woman that Petersen was hoping would become a Ford exec. A week later I followed up, calling Petersen’s office directly. I got the usual Ford bureaucratic front line with attendant BS, but eventually an answer came back that was so bluntly stated I knew it had to have come from Petersen himself. In short, Petersen said Danny could have whatever he wanted from the parts bin and they’d figure out pricing that was entirely friendly, so Danny should call.

Well, Danny didn’t follow up and I was ready to strangle him–when a second bite at the apple came along. Once again, enter one of the only enthusiasts employed by Ford, John Clinard. The occasion was lunch with Alan Gilmour, the affable bean counter who owned vintage Astons and Ferraris. (Gilmour also had the balls to axe Jaguar F1 when it became obvious the company could not sustain the effort.) After suffering through a lunch with a bunch of editors I couldn’t stand, I approached Gilmour and delivered the portfolio. Once again, a positive response. And once again, Danny didn’t follow through. I suspect Danny was reluctant because it was too high level and he didn’t feel secure in his project at that time. It does take brass balls to ask the higher ups at a major car company for help building your sports car, particularly when no one has a clue who you are. Though Danny claims to this day he made his way into Ford via a friendly Ford guy from Atlanta, I wonder if Gilmour did not have a hand. In the end, connection was made to Ford through a regional rep of some sort, and engines started arriving in crates. A major obstacle was removed.

Bringing together bright, creative and nutty people is a favorite pastime of mine. During this period, Freeman Thomas was working for my magazine as design critic. Mostly he was using my fine reproduction to promote his skills, and to good end. When the Chrysler guys invited me to have dinner with Tom Gale, I asked if I could bring Freeman and his wife along. Freeman had been keeping a photo journal on the development of the Panoz roadster and he was not shy when the time came to plonk it down on the dinner table and talk shop with Gale. Two things came from this dinner. Freeman eventually was made head of Chrysler Pacifica, Chrysler’s advanced design center in Carlsbad, CA. When I saw Tom Gale at the Tokyo Motor Show in 1999 while working in Hiroshima on what became Mazdaspeed, I mentioned that I had not seen Gale since introducing him to Freeman. Tom ripped open that endearing grin of his and said, “Some people you don’t forget about.” The other upshot? I think the Plymouth Prowler was born at that dinner table, as Gale thought through the possibilities. A Panoz roadster is not unlike a Prowler. And gratuitous as it might be, I must say I always thought Tom Gale was among the nicest guys in Detroit who also managed to be successful. Nice and smart guys usually get trampled in Detroit by assholes with MBAs who know nothing about cars. Whenever I see a Prowler on the street, I get a big smile for a whole host of reasons.

These were happy, challenging days. One night Danny and I were trolling around in my long-term Nissan 300ZX. We pulled into the magazine’s parking lot. A fog fitting enough for a Dickens novel had fallen on Newport, and we couldn’t see too far. Danny’s one to egg people on. He demanded donuts, so I set the ZX spinning, round and round. When we both reached a point where the laughter was hurting, I brought it all to a stop and parked. I was about to put the key into the front door lock of my office when a Newport Beach cop pulled up and nailed us with his search light. I opened the door so he’d know I was a tax-paying citizen, and walked over.

“What’s going on here, guys?”

“Oh, my friend has never done a donut so I decided to throw a few for him. It’s late and no one is around.”

”Let’s not have any more tonight,” the cop said. No doubt disgusted with the maniacal grin splitting my face in two, he sneered and hit the gas. I swear he called me an asshole. As soon as he was at the far end of the parking lot, by the bikini wholesaler, Danny and I burst out laughing.

Not long after, Nissan delivered the brand-new 300ZX Twin Turbo for us to test. Another night at Muldoon’s, with Danny having plenty of Guinness, Harp and whiskey—I actually had enough discipline not to drink much in those days, paranoid about legal ramifications—and we decided to take a fast trip. Down PCH, we passed through Corona Del Mar and entered the then-undeveloped section of coast between Newport and Laguna. At one point, we were doing something like 135 or so. Frankly, I can’t remember. At that point in life, I lived by the maxim espoused by an old race photographer: a day without hundreds just ain’t worth living. Late-night high-speed runs were part and parcel of my Omar Khayyam lifestyle. We shot up Laguna Canyon, and repeated the high-speed run on the 405 North. Danny was again despondent about his chances for success. He was much in love with the thoroughness and quality of Japanese production sports cars of that time, and the ZX Twin Turbo certainly showed the performance potential. Nearly 20 years later, it’s funny to think that 300 horsepower is not considered impressive.

After quite a lot of struggle with the clay, Danny, Freeman and a clay modeler brought in by Freeman laid up the molds. They had one clean shot, because in the late 1980s digitizing equipment wasn’t readily available, particularly to a lonely guy sleeping in a warehouse next to his clay buck. I remember the sunny day we loaded the clay molds on a rented truck to carry them out to Superform, based in Riverside. All those weird curves chopped up into producible sections. Superform would create giant molds onto which taffy-like alloy would be blown, the alloy in essence shrink-wrapping around the mold, then cooling.

Once the molds were completed, Danny needed to get back to Georgia. After such a lengthy effort, his wife was none too pleased with him. Understandable, but all worked out for the best and Danny’s two girls are well on their way to college now.

With body engineering under way, Danny turned to the frame and suspension. Using a local fabricator, the same guy who welded up the original fermenting tanks at Chateau Elan, Danny began work on the stiff but crude frame. He worked up new jigs, and switched to square-tube stainless steel, another step towards sophistication and away from the kit car world. The early cars ran the old 5.0 225 HP Mustang drivetrain with attendant live rear axle.

Danny pulled one fiberglass body from the original molds delivered to Superform, and built a prototype. As I was the only journalist who knew about the car or cared, I got first drive. As I was involved with a crazed redhead in Atlanta at the time, it was altogether too convenient to make the trip to Atlanta and run a story. The Panoz roadster shared the cover with an MVS Venturi convertible and, as I recall, some Porsche turbo one-off. Hey, at the time there just weren’t many sports cars, so Porsche turbos were a monthly staple. What I wouldn’t have given to edit that magazine in the late 1990s and on, but that’s another story.

The prototype was painted aquamarine metallic. It was fairly well turned out, but not ready for prime time. Danny had most of the plumbing and wiring sorted out and routed, but the front suspension and particularly the steering were far from sussed. The mistake of asking an Austin-Healey owner to decide if the interior was roomy enough was proved beyond doubt. The car was cramped, and I had to drive with my left elbow hanging in the breeze. Towards sundown, the car expired and Danny panicked, not wanting the local denizens to see his car broken down at the side of the road. Considering his family’s prominence in the local economy, his panic was understandable. I can still see Danny by the car, red-faced. This was his dream and it had just pissed on his leg. I did my best to give him good cheer. My review focused on lots of fluff about the design evolution. I glossed over the development challenges ahead. Danny was my friend and, yes, God damn it, I gave him a boost in print.

A pan shot from the first "road test" of the Panoz roadster, shot by John Crall.

Fact is, the steering was never sorted out, nor the front suspension, which never had a sway bar, as I recall, which means it could never have progressive cornering transitions. It simply fell over to one side or the other, with the stiff rear suspension anchored at the back.
In the good old days, Danny and I were inclined to stir up trouble. He had a Jeep pickup, one of those with the word “Honcho” or “Hondo” on the side. The Chateau was laced with lightly graveled roads, and Danny and I had more than a few exciting drives in the Honcho, sliding around corners and more than once almost flipping. Those days were a good laugh.

One night we decided to round up the young woman who managed the field staff of the chateau. She lived in the double-wide where Danny had once lived when the chateau was nothing but forest and red clay. To announce our arrival, Danny slid the Jeep pickup around the half-acre in front of this woman’s home, and we drove in between the grape stakes. As you might guess, considering this woman lived alone in the boonies, she was not amused. Danny told me to pretend Don Panoz had sent me over looking for a good time. So I get out of the Jeep, and saunter up to the front porch. She was backlit and I didn’t notice she had a revolver aimed straight at my chest while I delivered my idiotic lines about Don and Danny telling me I might have a good time with her. Thankfully, she saw Danny get out of the Jeep before she put a couple of cross-top .38 Special rounds into my chest. That might have been a real downer. She looked at Danny in disgust, invited us in, gave us each a beer, then agreed to come back to Danny’s home to hang out. Ah, the joys to be found in your twenties.

Some years later, when working for Ford Special Vehicle Team, I called up Danny. He had a car in Detroit, in the hands of some Motorcraft marketing guy. The car was brought around to one of our Wednesday marketing/engineering meetings. I had to make sure that John Plant, the marketing guy for SVT, was not around. He would have had a fit. Without him, we had a good time looking over the car. John Coletti and his guys gave it the once over. Al Oslapas, who at the time was monkeying around with a turbo Escort, noted the odd steering column and said that might be one problem that couldn’t be fixed. Everyone marveled at the quality of the craftwork. So did I. This was 1994 or ‘95, and I had let contact with Danny filter away. I was more interested in SVT, and batting a few ideas around with ex-SCI writer Chris Bibb, who was formulating a relaunch for the McLaren F1. (Chris now manufactures the McRae off-road Dakar buggy.)

Danny resurfaced because he was using several Detroit suppliers to help build his first race car, that GT2 Batmobile with the bubble roof and trimaran front end, engineered by Reynard. Danny’s father was now strongly behind his efforts and I remember Danny saying that his father looked at sports car racing and had astutely concluded that the only real value was “in the name Le Mans, and the race,” or words to that effect. You gotta love a guy who can cut to the heart of the matter and reconfigure the sports car world around that startlingly simple and pointed revelation. Funny, but the much hated Tony George made the same conclusion: if you own the Speedway, you own open-wheel racing in the US.

In this period, I visited Danny in Georgia, in the first of the big steel buildings put up on the land opposite the Chateau. He was most curious to know about SVT and Ford’s work on the quad cam Cobra motor. Danny had become fascinated with extruded aluminum at this point. Little surprise that the roadster became the Panoz AIV, Danny’s evolution of the old Costin tube frame being supplanted by extruded aluminum girders. How Danny fished those things inside the existing Superform body could possibly be one of the world’s great engineering mysteries, but he managed. The car was now much wider, and he was using some Lincoln and custom bits to create an independent rear suspension of some variety, as I recall. But at this point, I was far away from Danny’s operation.

I remember sitting in a friend’s office in Dearborn when a Guards Red AIV drove up in front. It had the new quad cam V8, which had necessitated cutting a big hole in the gorgeous clamshell hood to add clearance. The hole was covered with a big fiberglass toupee. A horrible end to one of the two forms on the body that Freeman got very right, along with the finely shaped rump—and perhaps the lower panel beneath the hood, with its dirt tracker influences and pretty curves.

You all know the story from this point, and there are others far better equipped to tell it. It needs to be said that Danny really did take a flying leap with this car, pursuing a dream many people hold but very few ever achieve. His father was not supportive, his father offered no money. One of Danny’s favorite lines in these early days ran something like, “Sometimes you just have to leave the womenfolk behind, grab your gun and knife and head into the wilderness.” Of course this was delivered with Danny’s good humor and maniacal grin. I always suspected that the old man wanted to see if Danny would stick with it, to see if he’d quit, give up, start whining. Well, Danny didn’t quit and in time the old man got behind his son’s effort. In fact, that came shortly after the debut party with the prototype I drove long ago.

About the time that Don and Danny started building race cars for Le Mans, my good friend Dan Passe was a young lad fresh out of Cornell and various internships with Chrysler PR. He was given the assignment of handling PR for the Panozes at Le Mans. I gave Dan the best possible advice I could, and off he went, all of 23 years old. Dan’s best remembered moment? When Don Panoz told Dan he was about to announce the formation of the American Le Mans Series and it would be happening in a short while, so get the press gathered up. I’ll give the kid credit. Dan Passe came through it unscathed and still turns a buck in the racing world. Don always paid his bills and always paid top dollar, but he expected solid performance in return. I think young master Passe delivered. Dan went on to pass the bar, spend a year as Nextel’s trackside PR man, and do the same with Roger Penske in IRL and ALMS.

Though Danny and I have, for the most part, been distant since the mid 1990s, talking a couple dozen times at most and meeting only a few times in the past 15 years, I remain a loyal supporter of his efforts. It’s easy to step in to a set-up that’s running, that has an organization and financial backing. One reason Danny and I got along so well at the time? We were both engaged in seemingly futile efforts. Start-ups are tough and having been through several now, I will be the last guy to knock Danny for the final result with the AIV roadster. Why? Whatever the merits of the first car—and it holds limited merits for those who enjoy driving a well-sorted car—one is forced to commend Danny for giving it a shot, remaining obsessed and compulsive, pushing to make the car better, reinventing it on virtually every level and, in Japanese Kansai fashion, taking away lessons that he applied much more successfully to the Panoz Esperante, which Car and Driver once rated as superior to the Jaguar XK8. That is one hell of a learning curve. I only wish that Danny could have continued with a third road car. Panoz Auto Development had the makings of a sports car legend.

I live at the beach, where many fine cars reside. One day I was at the grocery store. I parked, and looked over my shoulder to see a sapphire blue Panoz AIV roadster. I was shocked, as I’d never happened across one in everyday real life, only at car shows of one stripe or another. Here was one at a grocery store. I jumped out as the AIV driver was backing up, then trundled up to the main traffic lane in front of the store. I stood there, transfixed, watching the odd long-legged spider walk up the lane, turn left, and head onto PCH. It sure had a nice looking behind.