When Horacio Pagani migrated to Italy from his native Argentina, he lived in a tent with a bicycle for transportation. Two months later, he landed a job in Sant’Agata Bolognese as a junior mechanic at Lamborghini. Three decades later, he was standing in a ritzy hotel parking lot in Monterey, California, still wearing the boyish grin he must have had as a 10-year-old car-doodling son of a baker in the Argentine Pampas region, about to take me for a spin in his new $1.2-million mid-engine, Mercedes-powered supercar, the Huayra.
Named for the god of wind to the Aymara people of the Andean highlands between Bolivia and Argentina, the Huayra (say “WHY-ra”) will be Pagani’s first car to be sold in the United States once it passes all of the requisite crash tests, which will be in about two years. Finally, America will be exposed to Pagani’s handiwork, which has earned a reputation for meticulous attention to detail.
Indeed, there are no parts-bin components anywhere on the Huayra. All the interior knobs, gauges, fluid caps, and miscellaneous hardware bits—the stuff that small automakers often steal from larger ones to save money—is completely bespoke to the Huayra, cast or chiseled out of aluminum and stamped with a Pagani logo. The Brembo brake calipers say Pagani, the custom luggage designed by Pagani himself says Pagani on it, even the glass has Pagani written on it. The key is a miniature sculpture of the actual car, separating in two pieces to reveal the key on one half and a USB drive for music on the other.
This is why the Huayura, like the Zonda it replaces, is so expensive. That and the fact that the car has 1200 fasteners made of titanium fabricated to Pagani’s specification, each one costing roughly $75 but weighing about half what a steel bolt weighs. It takes six months to build a single car and since 1999, the company of 67 people based in Modena (about five miles from the Maserati factory) has built only 140 cars or so—more like motorized art objects, really—in its entire history.
Pagani made his fortune selling carbon-fiber and composite materials to both Lamborghini and the Italian government, so it’s no surprise to find acres of the black stuff in the Huayra. The central tub is carbon-fiber weave, naked and on full display in most places, laced with titanium strands, which makes it less brittle and more malleable in a crash, he says.
The front and rear subframes are constructed of chrome-moly tubes with forged aluminum suspension components and inboard shocks. The engine is an essentially stock Mercedes-Benz M158 6.0-liter V-12 running twin low-pressure turbochargers to make 700 hp and 738 lb-ft of torque, the latter peaking at 2500 rpm. It drives the rear Pirelli P Zeros through a seven-speed Xtrac single-clutch paddle-shift gearbox.
Weighing about 3000 pounds, the Huayra wears carbon-fiber bodywork inspired by an aircraft wing, says Pagani. Shaped in the wind tunnel at Mercedes-Benz (a very good friend to Pagani over the years) the Huayra’s underbody pan is molded in a wave form to manage pressure zones around the front and rear axles for reduced lift, and the upper body has moveable flaps at both ends which act like ailerons on a wing. They selectively lift in corners to aid turning, and go full up to serve as aero brakes during heavy braking. “It was a real headache,” says Pagani of designing and engineering the active aero flaps.
Because of the turbos, the Huayra’s voice is fairly muffled, leaving the cabin filled by the rumble of the huge tires. When Pagani stands on it, the wheeze-whoosh of the compressors is the most distinctive sound, as it is in other turbo wonder-cars such as the Bugatti Veyron. Still, the speed comes on lung-emptying quick and the scenery blurs. Pagani likes to manually shift the transmission with the center shifter, itself a piece of sculpture composed of some 60 components. “I am nostalgic for the old style” manual shifter, he says. When I ask why the car he has designed and built does not have a stick, he says it’s the customers. They want automatics.
Traffic during Pebble Beach weekend being what it is, we could only take a few turns of the Pacific Coast Highway at speed. The Huayra holds fast and turns in quickly, but Pagani says the car is set up to understeer at the outer limits. “If you are Schumacher, okay, but for everybody else, we make it safe,” he says. Because Europe is overrun with speed cameras and traffic, Pagani says he isn’t interested in a top-speed competition with other car makers, so the Huayra is electronically limited to a wimpy 224 mph.
The Xtrac gearbox delivers its shifts smoothly in comfort mode, and only gets slightly harsher in the sport mode. It can also be set to full automatic. The suspension of racing-style inboard coilovers is fairly compliant for a mid-engine doorstop, and it soaks up the lumps without transmitting too much bump energy into the cupped leather seats, which are as hard as concrete but strangely comfortable. Gullwing doors ajar, it’s a lift to haul yourself out of this ultra-low limpet, but it’s twice as easy to exit and enter than, say, the gullwinged Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG.
Pagani will allow the first test drives of the Huayra in November in Italy, so we’ll get some experience from behind the wheel then. Meanwhile, the company already has a three-year waiting list for the Huayra from customers in Europe and Asia, so the U.S., which is expected to take only five cars per year of the annual build rate of 40 cars, isn’t needed to sustain the company. Still, Pagani is eager to sell here; almost as eager as we are to see Paganis on U.S. roads.
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