WELCOME TO PUMA SPORTS CARS ... If you appreciate and enjoy good sports cars, you probably recall the first time you drove a Porsche. It might have been in the late Fifties or early Sixties, perhaps a 1500 or 1600 coupe. You remember how much character it had, how honest it was. Its solidity, its agile handling, its long-legged gait and its amazing comfort showed it had been made by men who love automobiles. Porsches today are another order of magnitude more complex, more elaborate and more costly than the models of the last generation from Zuffenhausen. But there is an automobile in production now that's a technical twin to a 1961 Porsche 1600, in almost every important specification. There are only two big differences: Brazil's swinging new Puma GT 1600 is 7 and a half inches lower than the Porsche and weighs 500 pounds less. One other difference: Instead of looking like a well-used cake of soap the Puma has somehow captured the crispness of the Lamborghini Miura and the aggressiveness of the Ferrari GTB. When you first see the Puma, a normal car built on a normal chassis by (perhaps not quite) normal men, you think: "This is incredible. If this can be achieved, with such logic and beauty, and in a car tooled for very simple production, how come there are so many ugly-looking sports cars in the world?" Not that it has been easy to come this far, for Puma. Brazil's native automobile industry is only a child, a scant dozen years old, and while it is capable of doing many things it has not yet needed to strive for the detail excellence that a fine sports car requires. This handsome car has been brought into being by talent, persistence, ability and good luck. |
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