In an interview with Howard Stern, lead singer David Lee Roth explained the meaning behind the trademark song. Although the song features some suggestive lyrics, it is about a car that Roth saw race in Las Vegas; its name was "Panama Express", hence the title of the song. In the Stern interview, Roth did not explain why the song was about a car rather than the usual Van Halen material.
Panama was also the name of Roth's car. He had the hood and bumper mounted in his hallway, which can be seen in his video for "SHOOBop". He has a stuffed deer's behind crashing through the front windshield. A plaque underneath reads, "Your First deer, courtesy of PANAMA."
During the bridge of the song where Roth says "I can barely see the road from the heat comin' off it," guitarist Eddie Van Halen can be heard revving his 1972 Lamborghini Miura S in the background. The car was backed up to the studio and microphones were attached to the exhaust pipe to record the sound for the song.
Nice bit of music history there, muchly appreciated.
There's more. Here's a pic of the car from his SHOOBop video:
https://files.catbox.moe/nsovos.PNG
The red ’51 Merc custom shown in the mind-blowing Panama video, in between scenes of a presumably coke-smuggling biplane transforming into a flying David Lee Roth and some very un-provocative pole-dancing, is not the car named Panama. The red Mercury is Roth’s personal car (or its clone -- the first was built by George Barris, and the second, by Kustom Merc King Dick Dean). Dubbed “California Girl,” the low-riding four-door convertible appears in the music video for Roth's cover of that Beach Boys song and is the subject of legends of its own. In one, Roth raced it across the country to win a spur-of-the-moment bet, before or after mounting it on a late-model chassis (which would help explain the "power steering" reference in Panama). In a more recent, and probably more sober, telling of the tale, he had the car clandestinely flat-bedded for the long haul before driving the last leg of the trip.
Depending on which strain of Van Halen lore you subscribe to, “Panama” is either the name of David Lee Roth’s 1969 Opel Kadett Caravan wagon or a drag racer he saw named “Panama Express.”
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