After 14 years as the auto industry’s House of Fabergé, Pagani Automobili has built the paltry sum of 132 cars, just shy of Ferrari’s output every two weeks. Most are the original Zonda, with just 10 of the new, U.S.-bound Huayras yet in existence. Judging from the interrogations we received while stuck behind a massive wreck on the autostrada only 10 minutes from Pagani’s Modena, Italy, headquarters, that’s not enough to sear the brand into the consciousness of the locals, who are accustomed to seeing Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, and Ducati test vehicles tearing up their streets.
Horacio Pagani’s customers—an all-hands meeting wouldn’t make a decent lunch rush at a Denny’s—don’t seem to mind the brand’s obscurity. If you can peel off an easy million for a new Huayra, which starts at 849,000 euros or, when it arrives later this year, the spot-exchange equivalent in dollars, chances are good you own a lot of stuff that Italian truck drivers have never heard of.
To be sure, Modena is a tough town to make a splash in. But the Huayra (pronounced WHY-ra) has the requisite assets. It’s not just that it’s flagrantly gorgeous even while dragging its belly over an Italian speed hump. Or that it is adorned with fascinating details, from its soybean-sprout mirrors to the four titanium Inconel peashooters in back. Or that the carbon fiber’s clear coat looks deep enough to do 10-meter platform dives into.
And it isn’t just the beguiling movement of the Huayra’s motorized body surfaces that constantly lift and tuck like an F-16’s flaperons with the goal of reducing body roll and stopping distances. Or the 720-hp, 6.0-liter twin-turbo V-12, the old single-cam three-valver from the S65, custom built for Pagani by Mercedes-Benz AMG and anodized to a gilded fare-thee-well to resemble the Ark of the Covenant. Or even the cockpit with its bionic-Bauhaus sculptures in cut aluminum that make the driver feel like Lucky Starr chasing the Pirates of the Asteroids.
What really makes the Huayra startling is that all of its highly cultivated (and, in some cases, efficaciously questionable) flair pulls together to make a stupendous road car. The level of lateral grip, the triple-digit stability, and the braking and steering control give this Beaux-Arts glamour boat the muscle to mix it up with the cars from Brand F and Brand L. Think Le Mans prototype with carpeting and license-plate mounts.
You feel comfortable in the Huayra. You can see out of it. Even if the gauges with their finely etched numerals aren’t easy to read in daylight, you are going fast very quickly, probing the lofty limits of the chassis’ relentless neutrality as the super-boosted Benz V-12 wheeze-bangs through each terrifying, scenery-smearing blast. This is not an exotic that is best hung on a wall—though it would nicely adorn just about any living room.
What the Pagani lacks is the feral mechanical bray that has long been the battle cry of Italy and is still available from the Lamborghini Aventador’s 8000-rpm naturally aspirated V-12. Sure, in a tunnel you’ll scare the pants off any nearby Andean highlanders by sounding like their wind god, Huayra-tata, after stepping on a tack. But for the occupants, with the car’s intake ducts making obscene sucking noises just a few inches behind the cabin, it’s like being two boogers riding in a cheetah’s nostrils.
Still, with very little formal engineering training, and, by his own account, being lousy at computers, Horacio Pagani manages to produce cars that are wholly credible even at their mesospheric price. He is first and foremost an aesthete, a car doodler as a child in Argentina who is still basically just doodling. Leonardo da Vinci is his lodestar, and stacked behind Pagani’s desk are volumes on the Renaissance master’s fusion of engineering and art.
Pagani, 57, who arrived in Italy in 1982 bearing letters of introduction from the great grand prix champion Juan Manuel Fangio, made his fortune in carbon fiber, first running Lamborghini’s composites shop, then as an independent contractor to the military and aerospace industries. His primary technology boast has been in reducing the ratio of resin to carbon fiber in finished pieces, taking the binder down to about 30 percent, thereby making components lighter without compromising strength.
Thus, you’d expect the Huayra to be a magnum opus in the black-blanket department, and it is. There are 15 different types of carbon fiber aboard, including $500-per-square-yard carbo-titanium, which has hair-like strands of the silvery metal woven in for extra strength. Five sheets, each only 1 mm (0.04 inch) thick, are molded together to form the walls of the central tub.
Pagani also likes to talk at length about the car’s aerodynamics, said to have been whittled down to a slippery 0.31 (flaps down) drag coefficient in a Mercedes wind tunnel. The movable ailerons at each corner come online at 50 mph, independently rising according to speed, lateral g, and steering input in order to stem lift, increase inside downforce in corners, and counteract body roll. Under braking, they flip up to max to act as air brakes.
From the driver’s seat, you can just see the flaps when they’re at full extension. It’s impossible to know without pulling a fuse whether they or an automatic hydropneumatic front suspension jack, which lifts the nose slightly at speed to vary the car’s angle of attack, fulfill their mission of reducing body pitching and braking distances and sharpening straight-line stability when closing in on the claimed 224-mph top speed. As is, though, the Pagani rolls around its horizontal axis about as much as a square wheel, so maybe the system does work.
Otherwise the circa-3200-pound Huayra makes no grand scientific leaps. The chromoly-steel front and rear subframes bolt to the tub to facilitate crash repair, and the 15-inch brakes are Brembo carbon-ceramic discs. As with the Aventador, the rocker-arm suspensions are fitted with inboard coil-over shocks, here supplied by Öhlins. The magnetic shocks used by Ferrari (but not Pagani) would add a touch of modernity and some low-speed suppleness to the Huayra’s otherwise decent ride.
The Pagani’s seven-speed sequential transmission, nestled transversely behind the differential to allow the engine to be mounted closer to the rear wheels, is of the older-school single-clutch variety. Pagani says the box, built by racing supplier Xtrac, saves about 200 pounds over a dual-clutch, a critical difference considering the transmission’s location. But it does so at the cost of slightly longer upshifts and lagging torque holes at town speeds. Stomp it and you get a downshift with all the subtlety and finesse of a refrigerator tipping over. The company says it’s still tuning the software.
The real reason to buy Mr. Pagani’s Huayra is that it’s the product of a maniacally obsessed perfectionist who plies his craft in aluminum and carbon fiber the way other artists work in watercolor or bronze. Everywhere you look on an unpainted Huayra body, for example, the carbon-fiber weave patterns mate perfectly, whether it’s in a herringbone pattern down the spine or, most impressively, across the air gaps between the doors and the body.
The metal pane housing the navigation screen and climate controls is machined from a single 15-pound block of aluminum and fitted with delicate teardrop buttons made to resemble a clarinet’s keys (Pagani is an avid, self-taught musician). The ignition key is an approximately four-inch-long model of the Huayra milled in aluminum that costs the company $3700.
Future restorers take note: The dozens of grade-7 titanium bolts in the rear suspension, which run Pagani $98 each and are part of the $37,000 in bespoke titanium hardware in the car, are indexed with all of their laser-etched Pagani logos facing up.
R&D director Andrea Galletti, who for some years punched a clock on Ferrari’s F1 team, showed me acceleration traces from a test car that indicate 3.3 seconds for 60-mph and lateral acceleration through a constant-radius corner of 1.5 g’s. Of course, it’s not a valid performance number until it’s recorded by our equipment, but from the data, it’s clear that more work is needed in the launch control and the 1-2 upshift, where the acceleration line droops painfully.
Galletti estimates the car is capable of 3.0 seconds to 60. It had better be, considering the Aventador does that, weighs a thousand pounds more, and costs less than half as much. The Huayra should do it with a target-launch rpm of 3500 rpm, says Galletti, possibly in second gear to take advantage of the AMG’s 738 pound-feet of torque and avoid the 1-2 upshift at 58 mph (second gear tops out at 75 mph at the 6000-rpm redline). Pagani’s PR man, the fabulously named Luca Venturi, promises us a testing opportunity in the U.S. this fall.
Specifications
VEHICLE TYPE:mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive, 2-passenger, 2-door coupe
BASE PRICE:$1,070,500
ENGINE TYPE:twin-turbocharged and intercooled SOHC 36-valve V-12, aluminum block and heads, port fuel injection
DISPLACEMENT:365 cu in, 5980 cc
Power: 720 hp @ 5800 rpm
Torque: 738 lb-ft @ 2250 rpm
Power: 720 hp @ 5800 rpm
Torque: 738 lb-ft @ 2250 rpm
TRANSMISSION:7-speed automated manual
DIMENSIONS:
Wheelbase: 110.0 in
Length: 181.3 in
Width: 80.2 in Height:46.0 in
Curb weight: 3200 lb
Wheelbase: 110.0 in
Length: 181.3 in
Width: 80.2 in Height:46.0 in
Curb weight: 3200 lb
PERFORMANCE (C/DEST):
Zero to 60 mph: 3.0 sec
Zero to 100 mph: 6.4 sec
Standing ¼-mile: 10.9 sec
Top speed: 224 mph
Zero to 60 mph: 3.0 sec
Zero to 100 mph: 6.4 sec
Standing ¼-mile: 10.9 sec
Top speed: 224 mph
PROJECTED FUEL ECONOMY (C/D EST):
EPA city/highway driving: 10/14 mpg
EPA city/highway driving: 10/14 mpg
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