Hyperleggera

The Pagani Zonda Field Guide

Horacio Pagani’s baroque street racer has turned ten and is leav­ing the super­car scene with the Zonda R track spe­cial. We cel­e­brate with an illus­trated guide of every Zonda model ever made, com­plete with Harry Metcalfe’s galac­tic scout­ship and a guest appear­ance by Scar­lett Johansson’s breasts.

Words: Peter Orosz | Art: Natalie Polgar + Peter Orosz

In addi­tion to dream­ing about space travel and putting out ware­house fires, long­ing to build your own super­car is a clearly marked phase in the devel­op­ment of the male fore­brain. It is trig­gered by a spike of testos­terone at around the age of six, quickly sub­sid­ing as Fer­raris are replaced by dinosaurs then girls as the focus of atten­tion. The chance of retain­ing the super­car dream is infin­i­tes­i­mally tiny: just com­pare the number of human males beyond the age of six to the number of super­car mar­quees cur­rently on sale. Far more men have seen the dark side of the Moon with their bare eyes.

Yet in some out­liers, the desire remains. A telling note of every supercar’s origin in the juve­nile brain is that most of them can easily be sketched by kinder­garten tools of art. Super­cars have wings, streaks, stripes, guns, jet engines, they sit low and wide and long, they cap­ture the very essence of the auto­mo­bile. Every­one with work­ing hands can Cray­ola a rec­og­niz­able Fer­rari Testarossa—try that with a Crown Victoria.

Hora­cio Pagani is one such out­lier. His first car has turned ten this year and is about to go out with a bang in the form of a rocket ship track spe­cial called the Zonda R. And just con­sider the sheer improb­a­bil­ity of that! Every single super­car man­u­fac­turer since Lam­borgh­ini has failed. People who built their own engines, people who used bor­rowed parts and big block V8’s, they all failed. Giotto Biz­zarrini failed, Ale­jan­dro de Tomaso failed. Gerald Wiegert failed.

Maybe because grown men simply are not sup­posed to retain their child­hood habits, the world is out against the super­car. Most prod­ucts ben­e­fit from indi­vid­ual man­u­fac­tur­ing, from arti­san goat cheese to Savile Row suits, but super­cars are the excep­tion. A car is such a com­pli­cated piece of machin­ery that indus­trial pro­duc­tion lines enable man­u­fac­tur­ers to shake down their designs to a qual­ity much higher than allowed by the human hand. Super­cars are mostly hand­made and they rarely number more than a few hun­dred. Cre­at­ing one that is the equal of but a mun­dane Civic is a gar­gan­tuan task.

And the eco­nom­ics of the busi­ness are brutal. The aver­age super­car may have an asking price ten times that of a reg­u­lar car, but Toy­otas don’t out­num­ber Fer­raris by a factor of ten: they do by a factor of one thou­sand. As for Pagani, he has built and sold around a hun­dred Zondas so far, and even at an aver­age price of half a mil­lion euros, he has earned at most fifty mil­lion from his cars. Unlike high-​tech wind­falls, such income cannot be spent on Fer­raris: instead, he has to design, build and sell actual prod­uct to people with taste, demands and money.

There have been a large number of Zonda sub­mod­els over the years, but they add up to a scant hun­dred cars. Drag them all to the Bwindi Impen­e­tra­ble Forest in Uganda and the moun­tain goril­las will out­num­ber them.

I have only seen a single Zonda on the road in my life and even then, I wasn’t sure of what I’d seen. All I know is that it was low, it was purple, and it zagged with a lat­eral speed more common in video games than on the sur­face of the Earth, where coef­fi­cients of fric­tion are not left to the whim of a text string.

You, dear reader, shall never have to face such har­row­ing moments of auto­mo­tive doubt. Pre­sented here is our guide to every Zonda model ever built so you will be able to tell them apart with supreme con­fi­dence. All ten of them.

Make that eleven, should you ever leave the grav­i­ta­tional field of the Earth.

C12

Hora­cio Pagani must be an extremely humble man. Just imag­ine his sheer focus over the decades. His restraint. After hack­ing together race cars in his native Argentina, escap­ing Galtieri’s dic­ta­tor­ship to Italy, sweep­ing the floors of Lam­borgh­ini to get closer to the cars—learning all about carbon fiber in the process—then set­ting up Modena Design, this is where he began: five pro­to­types in 1999. And it would still take years until the Zonda would become the Miura of our age and I wouldn’t hear about it for another three years.

The C12 had an AMG Mer­cedes six-​liter V12 to give it four hun­dred horse­power, which is about as much as the Volk­swa­gen Golf GTI will have in 2011, but of course this is 1999 and you’re still using Win­dows 98. It was more than enough.

Five C12’s were made, which means you have a better chance of coming across a spe­cific grain of sand in Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quar­ter, the Rub’ al Khali, than ever spot­ting one on the street. A street which may very well be in more devel­oped parts of Saudi Arabia and where you will have to look for two fea­tures. Snail-​eyes rearview mir­rors which are—unlike the split wings of later C12’s—combined with a one-​piece rear wing, car­ried straight over from Pagani’s pre­vi­ous auto­mo­tive project: the 25th Anniver­sary Countach.

C12 S

If you’ve ever seen a Pagani Zonda, it was prob­a­bly a C12 S. AMG must have been impressed with where Pagani put their big V12, because they gave him an even bigger one: seven liters instead of six, for­ever aban­don­ing hot hatch doses horse­power for five hun­dred and fifty.

Look for the snail eyes on the A-pillars, the split rear wing in the rear, and listen for the Hait­ian groove on the stereo: Wyclef Jean owns one.

C12 S 7.3

The people at Mercedes—whom Pagani was intro­duced to by his mentor, Juan Manuel Fangio—must have been real super happy with Pagani at this point, as they squeezed another three hun­dred cubic cen­time­ters of com­bus­tion cham­ber into his mon­ster of an engine, which is now approach­ing Viper levels of mag­ni­tude: 445 cubic inches in Mopar-​speak.

You will prob­a­bly be in grave trou­ble should a C12 S and a C12 S 7.3 pass you on the street if your street cred depends on telling cars apart. We at Hyperleggera Labs have obtained a copy of each, put it under our micro­scopes, but the dif­fer­ences were still not vis­i­ble at the level of diatoms. Of said diatoms, an impression:

C12 S 7.3 Roadster

The 7.3 Road­ster was built so that people who think road­sters are for sissies can shut the fuck up. Thanks to Pagani’s inhu­man knowl­edge of carbon fiber, the strength­en­ing nec­es­sary after get­ting rid of the roof was done by realign­ing the strands of carbon fiber instead of bolt­ing big lumps of steel on the bottom, as common on most road­sters. The car weighs no more than the 7.3 coupé and comes with a space warp device to morph all the paved tun­nels in the world into a con­tin­u­ous whole at the push of a button. Just so you can shriek your pas­sen­ger and your­self into lunatic, giddy joy with that V12 at full throttle.

The C12 S 7.3 Road­ster was fea­tured on Top Gear once, where Richard Ham­mond man­aged the unlikely feat of turn­ing it into the second most inter­est­ing thing on screen, as he opened his seg­ment riding a carbon fiber and tita­nium 118 Wal­ly­power speed­boat. And in a cruel twist of fate, the boat later showed up in Michael Bay’s The Island, who man­aged the unlikely feat of turn­ing it into the third most inter­est­ing thing on screen, after Scar­lett Johansson’s left and right breasts, respectively.

GR

Pagani has repeat­edly men­tioned that the Zonda’s fighter-pilot-meets-aircraft-carrier aes­thetic was inspired by the Group C racers of the Eight­ies. It was three years into the Zonda pro­gram when he was approached by race car builder Tom Weickart to turn the Zonda into a proper endurance racer. The inte­rior was stripped, a large rear wing was added, and due to reg­u­la­tions, the 7.3 was replaced with a six liter engine.

Lamborghini’s Law kicked in at this point, which states that with the excep­tion of Fer­rari, a bou­tique car­maker cannot suc­cess­fully make both road and race cars. Thus the superb Zonda of the road became the lame Zonda of the track. Even though its snail eye rearview mir­rors were replaced with con­ven­tional units, the car qual­i­fied at the bottom of the grid both at Sebring and at Le Mans, and quickly broke down in both races.

You will, of course, never see a Zonda GR on the road, so all this is irrel­e­vant. Unless some rich dude buys one to make donuts on a beach.

C12 S Monza

Con­tin­u­ing the line of race spe­cials, the Monza was a GR you could actu­ally buy, although I can’t tell if anyone ever did. Poten­tial owners could sigh in relief: freed from race reg­u­la­tions, the Monza got the 7.3 back, good for 600 horsepower.

Aspir­ing zon­dol­o­gists should con­ceal them­selves in the foliage by the Monza racetrack’s aban­doned Par­a­bol­ica curve and listen for the car’s high shriek. Patience will be awarded with a light­ning dash of blue: the C12 S Monza had its door­sills and its engine cover painted elec­tric Lego blue.

Please do not forget to pack enough water and sea salt. It gets very hot in Italy in the summer.

F

All that race car dis­trac­tion brings us back to the Zonda’s one major revi­sion. Named F for Juan Manuel Fangio, the man who on August 4, 1957 slipped the surly bonds of the Nord­schleife to become one of the great­est racing dri­vers ever when he broke lap record upon lap record in a three-year-old car to win his last Grand Prix and his last F1 Championship.

Fangio was the man who took the young Pagani under his wings and although he did not live to see his ini­tial­sake, he would prob­a­bly be pleased. The car has evolved in every regard, with tweaks to the engine, the aero­dy­nam­ics, the weave of the carbon fiber, the whatnot.

You will iden­tify this car by the world’s most beau­ti­ful rearview mirror ever designed. It also has a single rear wing as opposed to the C12’s split one.

Roadster F

This is so you can check your smug expres­sion in plain view of all passersby in the most beau­ti­ful rearview mirror ever designed, caused by owning a car with the most beau­ti­ful rearview mirror ever designed.

It will not hurt if you’re a Kuwaiti with a pen­chant for gilded Play­boy base­ball caps, like Al Roud­ham Bader, a pecu­liar man who owns at least three Zondas and stores them, along with his extra­or­di­nary lot of other super­cars, on a garage row in a Hun­gar­ian indus­trial town. He keeps them padlocked.

Cinque

In the Fer­rari tra­di­tion of dealer-​inspired spe­cial edi­tions, the Cinque—sans cento—is a more extreme ver­sion of the F. If you ever find your­self in Hong Kong and you’re dis­tracted by a large Japan­ese ath­letic shoe moving through traf­fic with great agility, con­grat­u­la­tions: you will just have seen twenty per­cent of the world’s Cinques. Head for the near­est snack store and buy your­self at least five dif­fer­ent kinds of M&M’s.

By the time you’re fin­ished with your first pack, the Cinque will have sped across the South China Sea and all the way across the Indian Ocean to land on the Sub­antarc­tic island of Ker­gue­len, where it will be eyed with sus­pi­cion by a res­i­dent alba­tross and where the car will get bogged down, forc­ing its rich owner to sub­sist on the Ker­gue­len cab­bage Pringlea anti­scor­bu­tica until the Marion Dufresne comes to his rescue.

R

Rumored and pho­to­shopped and ren­dered since 2007, this is to be the last Zonda. Shar­ing only ten per­cent of its parts with ear­lier Zondas, it’s a full-​on track menace, a car built to out-MC12 the MC12 and out-​FXX the FXX. We car nerds of the world shall hope and pray that there exists a person who had not given his money to Bernie Madoff and who, in spite of the finan­cial maelström this lovely, ludi­crous car hap­pens to co-​habit, will buy one, do what­ever it takes to make it street legal, and head for the line of black poplars at the head of the Hunaudières straight in Le Mans.

But not on race week­end, when the Straight is fouled with chi­canes, but on a breezy spring after­noon. Buy a café au lait at the Tertre Rouge Bar and wait for the inevitable twelve-​barreled shot­gun blast to your nerdy heart.

What a way to go!

C12 UFO

So, one more Zonda. Read­ers of Evo mag­a­zine will, of course, be famil­iar with found­ing editor Harry Metcalfe’s C12 UFO, the car he replaced his Fer­rari 550 Maranello with. Con­stant read­ers will also be aware of his fre­quent trips to Pagani HQ, which have resulted in a wholly unique car over the years, with mostly every­thing upgraded to F-spec.

Yet the car is—in the great tra­di­tion of obvi­ous mis­di­rec­tion favored by Italy’s secre­tive space program—no longer a car. On summer evenings, Met­calfe takes off from his high-​tech farm­house to scout nearby solar sys­tems. In an entirely unpub­li­cized episode, for instance, he made a pit­stop by Saturn on his way out to repair NASA’s Cassini-​Huygens probe, thereby extend­ing its mis­sion by another two years.

Not much is known about the propul­sion system of C12 UFO, but it fol­lows a proud line of Ital­ian space­craft dis­guised as Ital­ian super­cars, a line that began on the evening of March 12, 1915 in the Milan suburb of Portello with the A.L.F.A 40/60 HP Aero­d­i­nam­ica, a space­craft with car­ried, among others, Ferruccio Lamborghini’s pater­nal aunt Lucrezia Lamborghini-​Gianpoeano to Gliese 876.

Please don’t feel con­fused! The Ital­ian auto­mo­tive space pro­gram will soon be chron­i­cled here on Hyperleggera.

Until then, to the streets, Zonda spot­ters! Armed with your field guide, you will no longer call every long, loud and low car a Fer­rari. You will impress your friends, Aspies and non-​Aspies alike, and may even impress cer­tain women.

Look for blondes who can high-heel-and-toe.

∞ Published on Thursday, February 12th, 2009

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