Analog Dreams Live: De Tomaso P72 Debuts With a Manual and No Screens

• The De Tomaso P72 makes good on a 2019 promise—with a production-spec model that changes nothing and compromises less.

• A 750-horsepower Roush V8 and gated manual gearbox lead the charge in this screen-free, analog masterpiece.

• Limited to 72 hand-built units, the P72 is a love letter to ’60s racing wrapped in carbon-fiber engineering.

When De Tomaso pulled the wraps off the P72 in 2019, it looked like something dreamt up by a motorsport-obsessed sculptor after a night of reading Group C archives. It was stunning, elegant, and just unhinged enough to seem too good to be true. And for a while, it was. But now, six years later, that show car fantasy is becoming reality—and remarkably, De Tomaso hasn’t blinked.

The production-spec P72 is here, and it's not interested in meeting the moment. It’s here to reject it outright.

No Screens. No Compromise.

In a world where supercars are starting to feel more like iPads with wheels, the De Tomaso P72 swings hard in the other direction. Inside, there are no digital displays. No infotainment distractions. No configurable driving modes, sub-menus, or ambient lighting themes. Just analog gauges, exposed gear linkages, and quilted leather panels so rich they seem to belong on a vintage Vuitton trunk.

This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s a deliberate rejection of the over-digitization plaguing modern performance cars. De Tomaso calls it “timeless driving emotion.” Translation: if you’re looking for Apple CarPlay, you’re in the wrong car.

Power Meets Poetry: A Supercharged V8 That Sings

Under the P72’s flowing bodywork lies a properly brutal 5.0-liter supercharged V8, developed with Roush Performance. It produces 750 horsepower and 900 Nm of torque—all of it routed to the rear wheels through a 6-speed manual gearbox. That’s right: no flappy paddles, no automatic fallback, just a classic gated manual.

This powertrain isn’t tuned to chase Nürburgring lap times. It’s been built to create a connection—to the road, to the car, and to the era of performance driving that predated telemetry and torque vectoring. It’s raw, mechanical, and purposefully analog, the kind of thing you feel in your bones.

Form Follows Fantasy

The P72’s design remains one of the most striking things about it. Where modern hypercars are often sharp and aggressive, the P72 is all curves and sculpture. The long tail, the domed glass canopy, the haunched rear arches—it’s more art nouveau than carbon-fiber brutality.

De Tomaso has said the inspiration came from the stillborn P70 racer of the 1960s, a collaboration between Alejandro de Tomaso and Carroll Shelby that never raced. You can see the DNA here, but there’s also a healthy dose of Le Mans romanticism in the mix. It’s a car that looks like it belongs in motion even when parked.

Born From Racing Bones

Beneath the body, the P72 is built on the same carbon monocoque chassis used in the Apollo IE, offering cutting-edge rigidity and safety with a race-bred pedigree. It’s an unusual combination—modern materials and engineering in service of a car that wears its vintage inspiration on its sleeve.

That contradiction is at the heart of the P72’s appeal. It’s not trying to be the fastest or the smartest. It’s trying to be the most memorable. And in today’s performance landscape, that might be the boldest aim of all.

Just 72 Will Be Built—and That’s the Point

Production of the De Tomaso P72 will be strictly limited to 72 units, each hand-built in Affalterbach, Germany. This isn’t manufactured scarcity—it’s intention. De Tomaso isn’t chasing volume, or even relevance. This car is a declaration: that emotion still matters, that the analog spirit hasn’t been fully extinguished, and that design can still come before data.

There’s no price tag revealed yet, but rest assured: if you're already in line, you’ve stopped asking those kinds of questions.

A Car That Dares to Be Irrelevant—in All the Right Ways

We’re living in an era where automotive headlines are dominated by EV specs, charging speeds, and software updates. The De Tomaso P72 feels like a love letter to a different world. One where cars weren’t judged by their app integration or their drag race times, but by how they made you feel behind the wheel.

In that sense, the P72 may be the most relevant irrelevant car of the decade. It doesn’t exist to push boundaries. It exists to remind us why those boundaries mattered in the first place.

And if this is one of the last great analog supercars we ever get, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting farewell.

De Tomaso P72 Production Car Image Gallery.