One man was determined to create a groundbreaking British supercar – but the Panther Solo II fell short of its ambitious target. Glen Waddington suggests it should be better remembered
MANY ARE THOSE who’ll tell you that the 1990s were an era of me-too cars, that they all looked the same. Even Car magazine decried the situation, with a cover line on its July 1990 issue that asked ‘Euro-car clones: who’ll put a stop to dead-end design?’ Yet it was also an era rich in oddities and stylistic and technological digression. How about the bike-engined LCC Rocket and Strathcarron SC-5A? De Tomaso’s Guarà? Or perhaps the car you see here: the Panther Solo II. Only 12 were released on an unsuspecting public during 1990, but the headlines had proclaimed it a winner from first sight. ‘Behind the wheel of the most important British sports car since the E-type Jaguar,’ declared Car. ‘Britain’s most exciting new sports car for 25 years,’ hailed Autocar.
The Solo II lays claim to being the world’s first mid-engined, four-wheel-drive production car. It also featured a unique and innovative composite monocoque of aluminium and epoxy resin, which combined enormous strength with light weight. Not only that, but its sleek design was honed in a Formula 1 wind tunnel until it generated downforce at both front and rear. Yet the car hadn’t originally been intended to be quite so audacious (there’s a clue in the ‘II’): company owner Young Chul Kim had felt forced into taking a bold new direction little more than a year before it made its debut, somewhat hastily, in 1987.
Panther was a British company founded in Surrey in 1972 by Robert Jankel, mainly building retro-styled cars based on the mechanical components of then-current production models. Its range included the Vauxhall-based Lima roadster, the more luxurious Jaguar-based J72 and De Ville limo, and the slightly crazy Rio, in effect a lightly restyled, aluminium-bodied and extremely expensive version of the Triumph Dolomite. There was also the two-off six-wheeled Panther Six, which was powered by a mid-mounted and twin-turbocharged Cadillac V8.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Jankel’s company collapsed in 1980 and was rescued by Kim’s South Korean Jindo Corporation. His vision was for a forward-thinking sports car in place of those 1930s pastiches, though based on similarly proprietory components to keep costs competitive. Panther had re-engineered the Lima to become the Ford V6-engined Kallista, which it was able to build much more profitably; power for the new car would come from
