Alejandro de Tomaso
Alejandro de Tomaso (10 July 1928 in Buenos Aires – 21 May 2003 in Modena, Italy) was a racing driver and businessman from Argentina. His name is sometimes seen in an Italianised form as "Alessandro de Tomaso". He participated in two Formula One World Championship Grands Prix, debuting on 13 January 1957. He scored no championship points. He later founded the Italian sports car company De Tomaso Automobili in 1959. Life and career. Born in Argentina in a politically prominent family, de Tomaso fled to Italy in 1955 – from where his paternal grandfather had emigrated – in his late  twenties, after being implicated in a plot to overthrow the Argentinian president, Juan Perón. He settled in Modena, where he married Isabelle Haskell, an American heiress, and started a career in the car industry as a racing driver for Maserati, Scuderia Centro Sud and O.S.C.A. He drove in four Formula One Grand Prix races but scored no championship points. In 1959, he founded the De Tomaso car company in Modena, originally to build prototypes and racing cars, including a Formula One car for Frank Williams' team in 1970. De Tomaso then turned to high-performance sports cars, most of which  used aluminium backbone chassis, which were to become the company's technical trademark. De Tomaso cars include the two-door, mid-engined Vallelunga, Mangusta, and Pantera; the Deauville, a four-door saloon resembling the Jaguar XJ6; and the Longchamp, a two-door coupé version of the Deauville which later formed the basis of the Maserati Kyalami. De Tomaso's most recent product has been the Guarà, a two-door sports car with a carbon fibre bodyshell. During the 1960s and 1970s, de Tomaso acquired a number of Italian industrial holdings. As well as the Ghia and Vignale coachbuilding studios, he  earned control of the Benelli and Moto Guzzi motorcycle firms, the Innocenti car company (founded as an offshoot of the British Motor Corporation to build Minis in Italy), and, in 1975, the celebrated sports car maker Maserati, which he rescued from bankruptcy with the assistance of the Italian government. Over time, however, he sold many of his holdings; Ghia was sold to Ford (who would make much use of the name) in 1973; Innocenti and Maserati were sold to Fiat (which closed the former) in 1993. In 1993, De Tomaso suffered a stroke and the day-to-day running of  the De Tomaso company passed to his son Santiago. He helped in the engineering of the sports version of the fourth generation Daihatsu Charade, introduced in 1994, which was known as the Daihatsu Charade De Tomaso. Alejandro de Tomaso died in Italy in 2003.