Panoz started in 1988 with a job application to an Irish car builder that was about to be liquidated. Dan Panoz bought its Frank Costin chassis instead, took it to Georgia and founded his own marque in 1989.
- Country
-
United States - Active
- Since 1989
- Founded by
- Daniel "Dan" Panoz
- Website
- Official website ↗
An Irish chassis finds a home in Georgia
Panoz began with a job application that went nowhere. In 1988 Daniel “Dan” Panoz applied for work at Thompson Motor Company, a small car builder in Ireland. By the time anything came of it, TMC was being liquidated. So Dan did something bolder than taking a job: he bought the rights to a chassis the company had been developing, designed by Frank Costin.
That chassis crossed the Atlantic. In 1989 Dan Panoz founded his company north of Atlanta, Georgia, and the first model, the 1992 Panoz Roadster, was built around the Costin design. Costin was no unknown. According to a profile of the company in Automotive Design and Production, he was known for his work with Lotus, Maserati and Lister.
The name is simply the family name. Panoz says the family has Italian and Irish roots, and both show up in the story: an Irish chassis, an Italian surname, an American car. The company still sits in Hoschton, Georgia, where it keeps a museum of its road and race cars, open by appointment.
Father, son and a trip to Le Mans
Dan built the cars. His father, Don Panoz, took them racing. In 1997 Don founded the Panoz Motor Sport Group and commissioned the Esperante GTR-1, which Panoz describes as the first successful front-engine prototype race car in more than 30 years of racing. The company says the idea was straightforward: promote his son’s cars by racing them against the world at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Don went further than most sponsors would. According to the company’s own motorsport history, he created the American Le Mans Series and the Petit Le Mans race at Road Atlanta. The Panoz name was suddenly on a championship, a circuit and a race car, not just on a badge.
What is on the Panoz shield
The Panoz emblem is a shield split by curved lines into three fields. On the left is a green clover-like leaf, the shape most people call the Panoz shamrock. Beside it a red field and a blue field curl into each other, and the Panoz name is written across the shield in a flowing script. You will see the same crest on the company’s website, its race cars and the nose of every road car.
Here honesty matters more than a good story. Panoz has not published an explanation of its emblem, and neither its website nor its motorsport history describes the badge at all. The popular reading is easy to follow: the green leaf for the family’s Irish roots, and the red and blue curves as a yin and yang of balance, or as a nod to the colours of the American flag. Those are theories. The only thing Panoz itself confirms is the heritage behind them: a family with Italian and Irish roots, building cars in Georgia.
The badge has not gone through a public series of redesigns the way a mass-market logo does. The script and the three-field shield on today’s Avezzano and Esperante are the same idea that sat on the Roadster, so the emblem is best described as one crest, refined rather than replaced.
Front-engined, V8 and hand built
Every Panoz road car follows the same recipe: a Ford V8 mounted up front, a light body and a very small production run. The race cars followed that recipe too, which is why a Panoz at Le Mans sounded like nothing else in the field.
Landmark Panoz cars, decade by decade
- 1992: Roadster. The first Panoz model, built around the Frank Costin chassis bought from Ireland.
- 1997: AIV Roadster. AIV stands for aluminum-intensive vehicle. Re-engineered for the 1997 model year with an aluminium frame and body panels, and powered by a Ford Mustang Cobra engine, according to Automotive Design and Production.
- 1997: Esperante GTR-1. The Le Mans race car, and a street-legal version of it. Panoz calls it the first successful front-engine prototype race car in more than 30 years.
- 1998: Esperante Q9 GTR-1 Hybrid. Nicknamed Sparky, it paired the V8 with an electric motor and regenerative braking, and won its class at the first Petit Le Mans.
- 2006: Esperante GTLM. Won the GT2 class at the 12 Hours of Sebring and then at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, where Team LNT finished one lap ahead of a Porsche 911 GT3-RS.
- 2017: Avezzano. Debuted in the Pirelli World Challenge GTS Championship, where the factory team took six wins and ten podiums in 18 races.
Panoz is a small marque, but its cars share DNA with bigger names. The Ford engines link it to the Mustang, and on track its prototypes beat the factory Audi team at the Nurburgring 1000km in 2000. For a look at how small marques design badges like this one, see how car logos are designed.
Frequently asked questions
What does the Panoz logo mean?
Panoz has not published an official meaning. The crest shows a green clover-like leaf, a red and a blue curved field and the Panoz name in script. The company does confirm that the family has Italian and Irish roots, which is where the shamrock reading comes from.
Who founded Panoz and when?
Daniel “Dan” Panoz founded the company in 1989 in Georgia, after buying the rights to a Frank Costin chassis from the liquidated Irish firm Thompson Motor Company.
Where are Panoz cars built?
In Hoschton, Georgia, north of Atlanta, where the company also keeps its museum.
Did Panoz ever win at Le Mans?
Yes, in class. In 2006 Team LNT won the GT2 class of the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Panoz Esperante GTLM, a few months after the same model won GT2 at the 12 Hours of Sebring.
The Hoschton file
- Founded
- 1989
- Founder
- Daniel "Dan" Panoz
- Country
- United States
- Headquarters
- Hoschton, Georgia, USA
- Current emblem
- A shield divided into three curved fields: a green shamrock-like leaf, a red and a blue curve, with the Panoz name in flowing script
- Known for
- Hand-built front-engined V8 sports cars and Le Mans racers
- Website
- Official website ↗
