Canadian car enthusiast and FA member @Lazarus99 recently visited the Pagani Automobili factory in San Cesario sul Panaro, Italy. He wanted to share some mementos of his trip with our community through an FA Exclusive blog post! Enjoy the pictures and commentary below from Lazarus99:

“I'll start with my time in Florence... while it’s not a Pagani I couldn’t help but admire this V12 beast parked innocently in front of the St. Regis downtown. I imagined getting handed the keys from the valet and driving it through the tight cobble-stone roads on my way to a Trattoria for some Bistecca Florentine.

I booked the afternoon tour at the Pagani Museum in Italy's Modena province, which included a video on the history of Pagani and Horacio Pagani’s road to success. It recounted a story that I found very interesting: when Horacio worked at Lamborghini, he had been experimenting with carbon fibre technology. He believed so much in the future of the material that he tried convincing Lamborghini to purchase an autoclave that would allow them to build carbon fibre parts. Lamborghini’s response was short: “If Ferrari doesn’t have one, then why should we?"

Horacio however is a stubborn man and ended up going to the bank and mortgaging his house to buy himself an autoclave! He told Lamborghini about his purchase, expecting them to be excited that they could now utilize this new technology without having to pay for the infrastructure. Instead, they told Horacio they would not allow him to bring his newly purchased autoclave into the Lamborghini factory and they still weren’t interested in carbon fibre.

So, this is where Horacio parted from Lamborghini and setup his autoclave in a rented hangar. He immediately started working developing carbon fibre parts. A few years passed and he was asked to produce parts for Lamborghini. Flash forward to today, and all of Lamborghini’s cars today are riddled with carbon fibre, along with all other supercar/hyper car manufacturers.

After the video, we made our way into the display portion of the museum. Some of the holy grail Pagani’s lay sleeping here, totalling seven cars. Six Zonda’s in varying specs and one silver Huayra.

Here is a look at the two different engine packages offered. The 7.3L V12 naturally aspirated engine is fitted to the Zonda, while the 6.0L Twin-Turbocharged V12 is fitted to the Huayra. Obviously over the years, modifications were made to these engine packages tweaking output, weight, etc. However, the Zonda has only ever had a naturally aspirated engine and the Huyara has only ever been forced-induction. That is… until the newly released track-only Huayra-R which is set to sport a naturally aspirated V12 engine pushing 838hp with a 9000-rpm redline. Footage of this insane latest iteration Huayra screaming down Monza racetrack can be found at this link here

Check out the intricacies in the shifter linkage! It’s said that 150+ aluminum pieces make up the shifter assembly. While there, the tour guide also made it clear to us that every single piece of the manufacturer's cars has their logo stamped on it, down to every last titanium washer!

This Zonda was nicknamed the Nona! Italian for grandmother, it was the first production specification Zonda ever built and reportedly has over 500,000 kms on it! Pagani used it for most of their road testing and it has allegedly been restored and updated on multiple occasions. I love knowing that a supercar of this caliber has travelled so many miles.

Next up was the Zonda Cinque, named so because only Five were ever produced. It made headlines upon its release because it was Pagani’s first car to feature a carbon fibre/titanium hub and it was their first car to retail over 1 million euros. Anyone who got their hands on one at the time will be happy to know the current market price is 10-15 million Euros…

A stunning yellow Zonda was the first “drop-top” iteration of the Zonda chassis and was introduced in 2004.

Down at the end of the line is what I would consider the king of all track-only supercars… the Zonda R. This model is the same car that lapped the Nurburgring in under 7 minutes at a time of 6:47:50. If you have the stomach for it, here is a link to the mind-bogglingly quick on-board cam footage of the record setting lap: Link

The dry exposed-carbon body and the suspension intricacies are so beautiful. I found it amazing that even on a track-only car, Pagani found it so important to sustain their purpose to combine art and science into one exquisite example.

The rear one-piece section of the Zonda R laying up against the wall… I can only imagine what this piece alone would cost.

Even the bathrooms are covered in Carbon! A perfect carbon weave. Nice touch Pagani!