Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Cars

'Funnest car I've ever owned'

The 1999 Panoz Roadster is so rare it stumps even serious auto enthusiasts. But, the owner says, it drives like a dream.

By MARTY CLEAR
Published February 11, 2005

VALRICO - There are some drawbacks, Ron Drummonds admits, to owning a limited-production sports car that almost nobody has ever heard of.

They're not the ones you might expect. No problems with finding parts or keeping up with a temperamental engine. It's basically a Ford drive train, and pretty much any mechanic can work on it.

The main problem he encounters with his 1999 Panoz Roadster is that nobody seems to know how to pronounce the name. Both the vowels are long, so Drummonds has come up with a mnemonic advice to overcome that little annoyance.

"I just tell people you have to pay through the nose to own one," Drummonds said.

The other problem crops up when he brings the Panoz Roadster to shows, which he doesn't do often. The car is so unusual that even hardcore auto enthusiasts don't quite know what to make of it.

"They tell me, "We don't know what category to put you in,' " Drummonds said. "Sometimes they put it in specialty cars, which it's really not, or in '90s production cars."

Despite the exotic name, the car actually hails from Hoschton, Ga., about 50 miles northeast of Atlanta. There, Panoz Auto Development Co. builds very high-quality, very limited-production automobiles.

Drummonds saw a picture of a Panoz Roaster in the DuPont Registry. He always liked cars, and thought the Roadster looked pretty cool.

"I told myself that if I could ever find one of these at a reasonable price, I'd buy it," Drummonds said.

He probably didn't think that was likely to happen. After all, Panoz only built about 250 Roadsters in three years. The last one was born in early 2000. (With most cars, you'd say it "rolled off the assembly line," but since the Panoz Roadster is built entirely by hand, that's not accurate.)

Just by chance, a friend of Drummonds' happened to buy two Roadsters a couple of years ago, long after Panoz had stopped building them. Drummonds bought one of the two. Technically it was three years old, but it had never been titled, and Drummonds' friend had just recently purchased it, so it was virtually new.

Other than his line about "paying through the nose," Drummonds won't say what he paid for the Panoz Roadster, just that the deal involved a 1965 Mustang and cash. Brand new, the Roadsters retailed for $62,000.

The car has a Ford drive train, the same one that's in a Cobra. (For you technically minded car buffs out there, it's a 4.6-liter DOHC 32-valve 90-degree V8).

But since the car is extremely light - the body weighs just 415 pounds - the engine acts a lot peppier than it would in a Cobra.

"It goes from zero to 60 in 4.6 seconds," Drummonds said. "The top speed is 140. I wouldn't want to get caught in it at 140 in that thing, though. There's not much metal around you. I accelerate fast but I don't drive fast."

Because it has a Ford drive train, repairs are easy and engine parts are easy to find.

Drummonds said he was a little concerned at first about finding body parts if he needed them, but he has learned that if he dents a side panel, all he has to do is contact Panoz.

Even though the car is out of production, they apparently still have the molds and they'll simply build him a new panel. If he needs a new seat cushion, it'll be handmade at the Panoz plant, probably by the same guy who made the original.

"It's a really good company," he said. "The guy I bought it from told me there were little pits in the headlights. I couldn't even see them. But he called Panoz and they mailed me two brand new ones."

In two years, Drummonds has only logged 1,600 miles on his Panoz Roadster. It pretty much stays in his garage. Drummonds, a contractor who works out of an office in his garage, is seldom far away.

He knows it's a lot of money to have tied up in a car that hardly ever makes it out onto the open road.

But every time he drives it and feels the way it handles and performs, when he gets comments at every stoplight from people wowed by the sleek sports car, he realizes he has to hold on to it.

"It's the funnest car I've ever owned," he said. "Every once in a while I tell my wife I'm going to get rid of it, but then I take it for a drive at night and I think, no, I'm going to keep it."

[Last modified February 10, 2005, 09:09:06]