Do you remember the Panoz Esperante? Have you ever heard of the Panoz Esperante? I would be willing to wager that you haven’t, or that if you have, it’s been years since you gave one any thought. Panoz is a manufacturer in the loosest sense…in reality, they were building racing cars that they could homologate and sell to people who had the coin to pick them up. The Esperante was their coupe, more or less all the good parts of a mid-1990s Ford Mustang wicked up to a beastly chassis that could run rings around the SN-95 Mustang setup. As a street car, it was a unique sports coupe, something above kit car, a machine you bought because you loved to answer the question, “What the hell is that thing?”

They might have been questionable on the streets but on the track, the Esperante GTR-1 was nothing to take lightly. The GTR-1 is akin to the Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR…a tiny handful of road legal examples were homologated, everything else was built to destroy on the track. Power was from a wicked up version of a Ford mill, sitting at about six liters in displacement. Between 1997 and 2004, six Esperante GTR-1s were built and while they could hold their own, they were often behind better-funded teams like Mercedes and Porsche in the final standings. The GTR-1 last went out for battle at the Le Mans Series event at Spa in 2004, taking 14th, before being retired.