In the early hours of an August Monday in 1911, Vincenzo Perugia sits huddled in a dimly lit staircase at the Louvre His face is dripping with sweat as he quickly removes his white smock and wraps it around a small painting. A painting he isn't supposed to have a work that he believes belongs in Italy,not France. What he carries out of the back doors of the Louvre is the Mona Lisa, Italian painter, Da Vinci's Renaissance masterpiece.
This isn't just any painting. It is the painting. The stunning portrait of Lisa del Gioconda is largely regarded as one of the greatest works of art of all time, and that fame is in large part thanks to the theft by Vincenzo, which caused the world to give a new focus to the painting.
What the world saw when it returned to France two years later was that smile. A smile that was the result of Da Vinci's dedication to learning science as well as art. His knowledge of facial muscles guiding his hands to paint her elusive smile.
The painting would be one of the world's greatest meetings of art and science. Nearly a century later, a machine would grace the cobblestone streets of Italy. That was again a combination of engineering and poetry.
The creation of a man who crossed great oceans worked his way up from humble beginnings and stood up to the world's supercar titans. What he created would be an orchestra powered by 12 cylinders, a beautiful sculpture made of composites. The Pagani Zonda was a modern masterpiece, a supercar that stood on its own as Lamborghinis became stale and old and Ferrari became clinical and boring.
Pagani Zonda spilled its colorful paint across the streets of Italy and breathed life back into Modena. This is the story of a breakthrough performance from a true virtuoso. A tale spun as carbon fiber and 95 octane.
This is the story of Horacio Pagani’s opening act. Modena, Italy. In the 1980s, it is home to some of the greatest car makers in the world.
detomaso, Ferrari, and of course Lamborghini. The early eighties were lamborghini's heyday. Coming off the success of the Miura, their next creation would be a stand out hit the Countach.
Sure, it was uncomfortable, hard to drive and impossible to see out of. But the Countach was undeniably a work of moving art, and for a brief moment, Lamborghini was on top of the world. But that moment would not last.
As the eighties dragged on, no one could afford to buy their fantastic machines, and Lamborghini could hardly afford to make them. Italian passion gave in to American industrialism as Chrysler took over Lamborghini and the Sun appeared to be setting on the Italian automotive renaissance. Modena started to look like a ghost town and Italian supercar posters were being replaced by the rising stars from Japan and Britain.
Lamborghini was staring down the barrel of bankruptcy. DeTomaso quietly faded away and Fiat tried desperately to save both Maserati and Ferrari thankfully, though during all this turmoil, a young man was sweeping the shop floors of Lamborghini's factory and he had something to prove. One of Italy's most notable designer stories doesn't start in Florence or Rome, but Argentina, the birthplace of the ballpoint pen cartoons and, of course, chimichurri I quite enjoy the taste of Chimichurri, it has a delightful brightness and flavor, that brings out the umami flavors of meats such as filet mignon, prime rib, and even swordfish.
Nice. Perhaps the most notable creation of Argentina would come in 1955, when a boy named Horacio Pagani was born in the town of Casilda Horacio's parents raised him on the meager salary of a baker and a music teacher. It was barely enough to keep them afloat, meaning that when Horacio wanted a bicycle, he had to build one at a spare parts.
He would use that bicycle to ride around town and admire cars. And one of his first fascinations was with one of the most important sports cars ever made, The Jaguar E-Type. Look, it just cannot be overstated how many designers found their muse in Jaguar's open top sports car.
It's certainly a topic worth covering in the future. Horacio found an E-Type in his city and spent hours examining every detail of the shapely machine. There weren't very many nice cars in this small South American town, so the chance to be up close and personal to such an influential car was life changing.
That E-Type was a revelation for young Horacio, that a car could be so stunning and so beautiful with curves like a beautiful woman and with the roar of a lion bellowing beneath its skin. From then on, Horatio's focus was narrowed between his music lessons. He would read racing magazines and carve his favorite cars out of wood.
And in those magazines, he learned about the Italian city of Modena, where the world's most beautiful sports cars were bent from steel and aluminum. The holy Italian temples of Maserati, Lamborghini and Ferrari. Maybe it was the half Italian blood coursing through his veins, but Horacio knew that he would one day call Italy home and there he would make his own cars.
Throughout his teenage years, Horacio fixed things for locals in his workshop. The work within those walls would refine his skills and push him to develop a core philosophy with his hands. He would create art, play piano, carve wood and bend metal.
And with his mind, he would engineer repairing machines, building bicycles, and designing dream cars like Leonardo da Vinci. Pagani would seek to combine art and science. By 1973, Horacio had set off for college to pursue majors in both engineering and art.
All the while, running a successful business back home, creating a variety of products like barstools and campers. But in the late 1970s, he finally got around to fulfilling his passion, creating a car, the best kind of car, a racing car. Horacio penned the aerodynamic body of his Formula two car with confidence, but he lacked the engineering know how to build an engine for it.
So he reached out to Renault, which was one of the few companies with any presence in Argentina at the time. With his designs in hand, he demanded Renault give him an engine and allow him to be part of the Renault factory team. They acquiesced Their results and Formula two were not earth shattering, but it was still an impressive feat for a college kid to build a competitive racing car.
And this being the late 1970s, everyone was looking for another Gordon Murray to appear. Renault saw in Horacio that same spark and reached out to Horacio to get him more involved. To break the ice they brought with them another Argentinean Formula One champion Juan Manuel Fangio Recio and Fangio became fast friends and Horacio signed on to the Renault team as a design consultant to inspire young Horacio his new friend, took him all over to meet the heads of Fiat and Mercedes, whom he driven for in the past.
For Fangio, it was a chance for him to pass on his decades of racing knowledge and an excuse to party with young Horacio. For Horacio, it was his first real experience with rubbing shoulders with the automotive giants. This experience was the final straw.
Horacio knew what he needed to do, and in 1983 he packed his bags and moved to Modena. He arrived in Italy with no real prospects. Carrying a tent, a bicycle, and most importantly, five letters of recommendation from Fangio.
He would take those letters to all of Italy's finest sports car companies begging for a job. But he was turned down by Fiat, DeTommaso, Maserati and Ferrari last on his list was Lamborghini. The makers of Italy's most beautiful machines.
A perfect home for Horacio and his dreams of feminine shaped sports cars. But they, too, said no. With nothing left to lose, he showed up at Lamborghini's door anyway, and they begrudgingly gave a young man his dream job.
Young Horacio enters the hallowed halls of Italy's finest supercar builder Automobili Lamborghini. A shining icon of sant'agata bolognese As he stands, surrounded by the men who built the 350 GT and the Miura he stares with mouth agape stars in his eyes and a broom in his hand. Horacio Pagani is now the official janitor of Lamborghini.
Every morning he would climb on his bicycle, leave his little shack on the outskirts of town and get to work, cleaning up cigar ash and oil stains in the shadow of machines he could only dream of designing. Dirty, crummy job or not, his passion had not waned with hard work and patience. Horacio soon found himself rising through the ranks thanks to his wealth of experience shipping fiberglass back in Argentina.
He got a spot on the new Composite materials team. Their first project was creating the bodywork of the wild way ahead of its time Italian war machine, the LM002 a massive Humvee like truck. It was a pretty weird departure for a sports car brand and the V12 powered offroad beast was a critical failure for Lamborghini.
But it was a career boost for Horacio himself. He had proven himself to the higher ups of Lamborghini and even befriended famed test driver Valentino Balboni. His next test then was to finally work on a real Lamborghini restyling and adding deposits to the unloved Jalpa By 1987, his dreams were on the cusp of finally being realized.
He was a chief engineer overseeing the composites department and had become obsessed with a new material called Carbon Fiber. A strong space age composite material that had proven itself on the racetrack. Horacio wanted nothing more than to build the new special edition Countach out of the revolutionary material.
All he needed was an Autoclave and his team at Lamborghini could get to work. The heads of Lamborghini, though, didn't really give a shit about carbon fiber. I mean, after all, Lamborghinis weren't racing and Ferrari didn't build carbon fiber at the time, So why should they even work for a boss who just doesn't get it?
I sure have. That was not ideal. .
. anyway When you work for an out-of-touch lazy and uninspired boss, sometimes you have to just do it your fantastic self to prove he was right to Lamborghini. Horacio went to the bank and took out a gigantic loan and bought his own autoclave.
Now, for those who don't know, an autoclave is basically a giant oven and a vacuum chamber used to form and strengthen molded carbon fiber. They're massive and expensive machines. And Horacio just showed up one day with one at Lamborghini, working with sheets of carbon fiber and developing new techniques from scratch.
Horacio and his special deposits team would build the world's fastest Lamborghini The Countach Evoluzione and oddly shaped but stunning tech demo made out of carbon fiber, Kevlar and aluminum. The use of these new materials allowed Horatio's team to shrink the weight of the counter to less than that of a mazda miata and it was still powered by that massive Lamborghini V12, meaning this new Countach was capable of hitting 60 miles per hour in nearly 4 seconds and soaring to over 200 miles per hour. It was a concept car that was faster than the fastest car in the world at the time.
The Porsche 959. I mean, it wasn't pretty, but it was proof that Pagani knew what he was talking about. He was fervent in his belief that these new materials were the future of sports cars.
But Lamborghini continued to ignore him and probably because they were flat broke, the thought of building cars out of more expensive materials using huge autoclaves likely scared the heads of Lamborghini away from the idea. It was the late eighties supercar sales had plummeted, even though at the time Lamborghini was a small company, they just couldn't pivot to a new way of making cars. This, of course, frustrated Pagani.
His philosophy was that cars should be both beautiful and functional at all costs. They shouldn't be designed with profitability in mind. He didn't care if anyone bought them.
He just saw sports cars as art worthy of existing just to exist. After struggling with trying to push the Italian bull in a new direction, he shook hands with his engineers, packed up his autoclave and left. What was it about carbon fiber that drove Pagani to leave his dream job in pursuit of its use?
His dedication to the material was probably thanks to his lifelong mentor, Juan Manuel Fangio, who was perhaps the most unlucky racing driver in history. Fangio had been a magnet for automotive disasters throughout his entire automotive career. He drove off a cliff during a rally in 1948.
The accident killed his co-driver. A few years later, he'd be thrown from his car at Monza. Then in 1955, he drove for Mercedes-Benz, at Le Mans And we all know how that went.
He was even kidnaped in Cuba. Fangio was unlucky as sin. Even when he wasn't driving in 1981, Fangio was invited to Italy to be the guest of honor at the Monza Grand Prix.
There, the newly constructed McLaren MP4/1, driven by John Watson, spun off the track and smashed into a barrier thats Scott Watson, and. . .
a very nasty one indeed. It was the kind of accident that most drivers in the eighties wouldn't walk away from. Miraculously, Watson climbed out of the remaining half of the car unharmed.
The secret to his survival was that the MP4/1 was the first to be built with a carbon fiber monocoque, meaning that the driver sat safely encased in a nearly indestructible egg. That shell kept Watson safe from the crash. It also kept the car lightweight and rigid, and it started a trend that continues to this day.
Fangio and the rest of the racing world learned one immutable fact that day that the future was to be made out of carbon fiber. Now, at the time it was not an easy material to work with. McLaren themselves had to send their design off to Hercules Aeronautics to have them build the carbon fiber components.
Because no one in racing actually knew how to work with the stuff, translating the technology to a production road car would take a genius. Now, in 1987, Lamborghini had one such genius at their disposal, Horacio Pagani. But sadly he was ignored and Lamborghini would lose the race to build the world's first carbon fiber supercar.
That title would go to Jaguar with the XJR-15 (SORRY I GOT THE CAR WRONG) And then, of course, in 1992, Gordon Murray and the McLaren F1 would shake the industry forever. Murray's singular focus on weight savings meant that he had to build the F1 out of advanced composites like carbon fiber. The result was a car that had incredible stiffness and of course, unheard of speed.
It will not go any more than 391. But anyway, 391 is quite fast, isn't it? And it was proved to the world that Horatio was right all along.
As McLaren F1 began to go on sale in 1992, Pagani got to work on his own supercar. Pagani Drgas Carbon fiber autoclave all the way to Modena Italy, and opened up his own shop initially known as Modena Design. This new firm rapidly became one of the world leaders in carbon fiber design and production.
Out of the doors of its factory came parts for Ferrari's Formula One team, the Aprilla Moto GP team and touring cars around the globe. Horacio quickly made a name for himself as a guy that could make fast cars faster. If you were a race team in the early nineties, you wanted what Pagani had to offer.
Somewhere between consulting with the company that he left behind on their new Diablo and building top secret aircraft parts. Horacio called up his old friend and mentor, Juan Fangio, and told him to come over and help him out. It was time for him to finally follow through on his master plan to be Modena’a next great car maker.
He would code name the project C8. After Horacio’s wife Christina and his love of the Mercedes C-class race cars to begin, Fangio and Pagani took everything they learned about racing and building race car parts for others and applied those concepts to a radical new car design. Its outward appearance would come from Group C Racing.
During the 1980s, Le Mans cars were getting a low aerodynamic and incredibly fast, screaming Over 200 miles per hour down the Mulsanne and prompting race officials to add in a now famous chicanes you know, just to slow them down and keep things safe. Pagani was inspired by the beauty of these low, aerodynamically sculpted race cars. He also says that he was inspired by women sunbathing on the beach, which, you know, really embodies the ethos of Italian car design.
His flowing sketches, then, would be a combination of his two favorite artistic inspirations women and race cars. The racing inspiration didn't end with Group C, though. During the early nineties, Nissan had taken their speed wedge the Z32 300ZX and turned it into a fire breathing Le Mans champion.
The 300ZX IMSA GTS. Horacio took notes. After all, it was a fast car and he was designing a fast car.
So he added some of the advanced aero bits from the Nissan to his own drawings. Then from his consulting with Lamborghini, he added large single piece body panels and large doors to his designs. Perhaps remembering how hard the Countach was to get in and out of.
Thanks to a partnership with Renault to build new aerodynamic carbon parts for their race cars and the wild Espace F1 concept he had learned important lessons and structural designs. Every day he would walk around his workshop, talk to Fangio and Balboni and make improvements on the design based on what he experienced. Eventually he had the basic shape worked out on paper, but before he could start to work on the actual plans, project C8 needed something very important.
The beating heart the choice was obvious. Group C cars had V12s, so the C8 would need a V12 with help from Fangio who remember was a race car driver for Mercedes Benz. Horatio went to AMG and asked them for an engine even though he knew they were making a higher performance engine, the ones that would eventually power their flying race car program.
He humbly asked for lower spec six liter V12, the same kind used in the sedans. Mercedes agreed and promised him just five M120 v12s from their warehouse. This is where the differences between Horacio and other car designers are exemplified.
Gordon Murray demanded that his V12 make more than 550 horsepower and was upset when BMW wasn't able to shave an extra 20 lbs from the block Horacio just wanted a V12 because all the best race cars had a V12. And the fact that it was a 400 horsepower sedan motor didn't really bother him a bit. Pagani was much more concerned about how it sounded.
His mother had taught him to play the piano and that love of music never left him. The harmony of 12 cylinders singing in unison is enough to move any heart far more important than a few extra horses. Finally, all that was left was to combine all of the pieces together and give it a name.
He would call the car the Fangio F1 after the driver who had been by his side from the very beginning. Sadly, though, in the final stages of building this beautiful tribute to his friend Fangio, disaster would strike in the early days of May 1995. Juan Manuel Fangio passed away from health complications.
His life, a colorful tapestry of racing history and his passing a crushing blow to a man named Horacio Pagani. After a period of intense mourning, Horacio returned to his office to continue the project. They started together, but could not in good conscience name the car.
After his mentor so soon after his passing. Project C8 continued without a name for years, and finally, in 1998, after the car had been in development for six years, Pagani took a prototype back to his home country of Argentina. There in the Andes Mountains, winds could reach speeds of over 150 miles per hour, making it the perfect place to perfect a car's aerodynamics.
The local population has a name for these blistering gusts of air. The Zonda winds. Blessed by the spirit of his homeland, the C8 came back to Modena with a new name, The Mystical Wind.
His wife Christina, and 12 cylinders The Zonda C 12. And at the Geneva Motor Show in 1999, it was revealed to the public. It was a pretty brave decision by Horacio to create an entirely new supercar.
In the late nineties, McLaren's F1 had raised the bar for everyone in the industry. Ferrari and Lamborghini were becoming titans. A new supercar would need to be something truly unique to stand out amongst that noise.
Luckily, Unique is kind of Pagani whole thing. In 1999 you could buy Lamborghini's Diablo, a massive, beautiful supercar with a roaring V12. That was ten damn years old and had Nissan headlights.
The Zonda, meanwhile, was a bespoke sculpture made of space age materials, and since there were only ever be five of them, it didn't matter what it cost because they were already priceless works of art. Nothing about the car was ordinary. The engine cover is held down with a leather strap, which complemented the custom luggage bags flanking the beautiful carbon trimmed Mercedes V12.
The Zondas gaudy interior makes your Rolex look mundane. Giant toggle switches stab out of an aluminum dash flanked by suede and leather or whatever other material you wanted, since each C12 was a completely custom hand-built machine. The pedal assembly is machined aluminum custom fit to your driving position.
The seats were designed to conform to your body like an Armani suit, except made with better materials. Vents for the air conditioning resembled rocket motors, and unlike most Italian supercars at the time, they actually kept you cool. And finally, everywhere you look on the inside is that amazing lightweight material, known as carbon fiber, reminding you that not only is this car a truly beautiful thing to behold, it's also an engineering marvel.
But of course it's a supercar. How did it drive? It did only make a meager 400 horsepower to that pedestrian Mercedes V12, but it was light and it was aerodynamic.
So performance was on par with what you'd expect from Italy's finest. But if you were judging a Pagani Zonda based on how fast it was, you were missing the point entirely. You don't judge the Sistine Chapel by its seating capacity.
The Zonda was so much more than just another fast car. Contemporaries of the Zonda, like the CLK GTR and the Diablo were downright hard to drive. The CLK was difficult to get into, hard to shift and angry.
It was a race car. It cared not how comfortable you were. The Diablo was a lead weight passed off as a car.
Its focus entirely on esthetic beauty, little care given to its user experience. The Zonda. Thanks to its ultra light construction, opulent interior and absurd amounts of torque, was a dream to be in and drive.
You could shift from first to fifth and accelerate away a trick Horatio was proud to show people to drive it. You didn't need to be a race car driver at all. And like the McLaren F1 because of the carbon fiber body, it didn't need ridiculous brakes or advanced driving AIDS.
Any hamfisted moron could enjoy the drive. Then at the end of your Sunday drive, it was a car that you could park in front of the Louvre and get more attention than the paintings within. Despite the staggering price of nearly $300,000, which is well over a half a million dollars today, 57 buyers demanded a Zonda c 12 of their own.
Pagani now had a huge problem. They only had enough resources to build the five total, and one of them had been used for testing. So it's our first Geneva show.
We wandered into the show and just discovered Pagani, and we just couldn't believe this car the first time we saw it. And the and the magic ingredients. We couldn't understand how this car came from nowhere.
And as we've watched the progression of Pagani, we all know we're now with Zonda, R and Cinque It's just been the most amazing ten, 11 years of progression. And he's really brought this company to right to the fore and competes with the really big boys. The consumer response had at least proven one thing.
Horacio was right all along. He had proven to his old bosses at Lamborghini that he knew how to build a proper goddamn car. With that newfound confidence, what followed was pure insanity.
Some designers would be happy with a one hit wonder. They'd watched their car rise to greatness and make a bunch of iterations for ten years and call it good. Instead, Horacio Pagani chose to constantly improve the Zonda.
Always looking at the flaws, listening to feedback and altering the design. Following the 1999 release of the C 12, he immediately got back to work. A year later, he was back in Geneva.
This time Pagani Automobili had a couple more employees and they set about building a brand new Zonda. The Zonda s now powered by a 540 horsepower seven liter V12 similar to the one found in the infamous CLK GTR Strassenversion It had sport tuned suspension and an additional gear, meaning Now, if you felt so inclined, you could shift from first to sixth and the higher displacement engine was more than happy to keep you going. The C 12 S changed the Zonda from a competent supercar into a proper hypercar with a top speed well over 200 miles per hour.
A year later there was the S 7. 3 which made even more torque. It became more modern, more behaved thanks to traction control and ABS.
That was followed by the Roadster. Usually when a car becomes a convertible, it also becomes overweight limp garbage. The Zonda is being made completely out of carbon fiber, though, meant that the chassis stiffness was unchanged.
The base car was stiff enough not to need reinforcement. The brilliant Roadster was followed by the Pagani Zonda F there in 2005. Fangio's name was finally affixed to a creation by Pagani.
The F was extensively re-engineered. AMG had managed to force out an astonishing 600 horsepower out of their V12. It had inconel exhausts like the McLaren F1, Brembo carbon ceramic brakes, and since Pagani was now at the forefront of carbon fiber development.
The Zonda F had a new type of carbon fiber called Z-preg that weighed less but was stronger. A special edition Pagani Zonda F would become one of the fastest cars around the Nurburgring beating the Ferrari. Enzo.
It even beat the Bugatti Veyron around the Top Gear test track. This performance, of course, wasn't really to ratios focus. He once said that speed makes you lose sight of what's important to you, that as you drive faster and faster, your vision through the windscreen gets narrower and narrower until all you can see is the road.
And he wanted you to see his car. That apparently didn't stop him from building faster and faster cars anyway. Case in point, the Zonda R, a special track, Only Zonda, a completely new car that shared only 10% of its parts with the street car rumored to be built as a testbed for the upcoming Huayra It was such an incredible car it birthed the Zonda Cinque the road legal version of the Zonda R.
They both had paddle shifters capable of shifting in less than 100 milliseconds and were made of a new substance. Pagani had to remain one of the leaders of the carbon fiber world. So when it came time to upgrade his darling Zonda, Horacio chose to pioneer the use of Carbo Tanium fusion of carbon fiber and titanium.
There were only five Cinques produced Cinque being the Italian word for five. But that wasn't exclusive enough. Art loses all meaning if it's repetitive after all.
So following the Cinque was the tricolore. These were Zondas that were tributes to the Italian aerobatics team, and there were only three of them ever built. Each one sold for a mere million and a half dollars in 2012 at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Zonda showed the world its fastest creation yet. The Revolution, with the new iteration of Mercedes V12, making nearly 800 horsepower double what the original C 12 made. Like the R, it was only meant for the racetrack and like the R, it was also followed by a road going version.
The HP Barchetta, one of the most stunning Italian cars ever built. Like many Pagani, the Barchetta is not painted. There is simply a blue lacquer added to the carbon titanium body showing to the world.
The beauty of the material that Pagani pioneered so many years before. It is rumored to be the last iteration of the Zonda and in classic Pagani style. Only three were ever built.
One has been crashed and one is Horacio's personal car, a worthy gift to himself for crafting a symphony of incredible machines for over a decade. Each one unique and each one an improvement over the last. Every single one of them uniquely Pagani.
With the trio of Barchettas unleashed upon the world, Horacio had finally painted his first masterpiece, a beautiful, colorful painting of what supercars were meant to be moving pieces of art, not just soulless machines with space, age technology and lifeless designs, but elegant, flowing, impactful devices that demand attention and speak to the unique visions of their creators. Today, we are entering a new era of fast cars where the engineers, not the artists, hold the controls. Engines are getting smaller, drivetrains are getting more complex, and electricity is bringing the age of roaring engines to an end at a breakneck pace.
In the heart of Horacio, though, the wind has not stopped blowing With his brush, He has painted grander designs on the mirror. The Huayra And now the utopia, still backed by an orchestra of 12 cylinders designed with poetic lines and featuring details that could only come from Horacio himself. New creations that sing in the same key as the original Zonda throughout its more than 20 years of constant improvements.
The Zonda never lost its soul pure emotion painted on a carbon fiber canvas. Raw power without turbos or electric motors. A perfect blend of science and art.
What he gave the world was the fully realized vision of a young boy from Argentina who dreamed of one day returning home to Italy to create something special. Inspired by Leonardo DaVinci scorned by Lamborghini and driven by Juan Manuel Fangio, Pagani Zonda would be the wind of change in Italy that would blow through the entire automotive world.
