Tommaso Romanin When you sit inside a Pagani Utopia Coupé the very first sensation is of being inside a car from another era, rather than a modern hypercar with 864 horsepower and 1,100 nm of torque, a concentration of power, technology, uniqueness, refined attention to detail. The look is vintage, with home-made leather and aluminium, analogue instruments reminiscent of old watches and a single digital display in front of the driver, and then the manual gearbox with the linkages on display. But all it takes is for the engine to turn on and warm up for a moment and the majestic V12, developed by AMG specifically for Pagani, floods the passenger compartment and in a flash the characteristics of the car and all the ability to immediately create “a connection, a emotional bond with the driver, leaving room for involvement and fun”, as Francesco Perini, Head of Technical Department of the San Cesario sul Panaro (Modena) car manufacturer, explains in an interview with ANSA, during a visit to the company.
Utopia means non-place: alternative to reality, leap into the irrational. Horacio Pagani pursues all this, who when he describes the third act of his story, the car produced in a limited series from 2023 (99 Utopia Coupés, while there are 130 examples of the Utopia Roadster, launched in the summer at the Monterey Car Week), uses often the expression “timeless”. And a journey to a place, at least in part, out of time, is also what takes you to the factory where the Pagani are made, created with around 7,000 components made entirely by hand. Here mechanics, craftsmanship and the search for beauty come together.
The Horacio Pagani Museum, inaugurated in 2017, is a clear demonstration of this, an immersion in the history of the company and its founder, from his childhood in Argentina, to his years at Lamborghini, to the foundation of Modena Design and Pagani Automobili in 1998. The models made as a child, the notebooks with notes and drawings are on display, the garage where he designed a Formula 2 in 1979 is reconstructed, then there are the letters of introduction written by the driver Juan Manuel Fangio when Horacio decided to move to Italy in 1981 and work in the world of motors. So make room for the iconic Zondas, the Huayras, like the one in the ‘Tempesta’ package from the Transformers film or the one used by Cristiano Ronaldo in a famous commercial. If the museum is a look through the past, the journey to the present continues with the atelier. Imagined as a city square, with a clock tower and arches, it is the space where unique creations are developed. The objective is to combine art and science, copyright of Leonardo Da Vinci, another point of reference for the founder.
In the atelier, nine chassis are worked on simultaneously to produce 55 cars a year. From start to finish, it takes about six weeks to see a finished Pagani. All Utopias, Coupés and Roadsters, have already been sold. The roadster, the latest arrival, has a starting price of 3.1 million euros net of local taxes. The first to order it will be able to have it in April 2025, the last in 2027.
In the Atelier you don’t notice any worries, but you see people mostly intent on discussing and carrying out precision work on the cars, at a different level of assembly.
Many of the 230 employees are young, the average age is 32 and several hold responsible roles. The idea is to encourage and train integrated work: designers with engineers and vice versa, an experience in the field that leads everyone to actually be part of the whole.
Communicating with the large square, there are the cutting, rolling and trimming rooms, the autoclaves where carbon and composite materials are processed, another Pagani strong point.
Details are taken care of to the point of exhaustion because customers can request customizations of all kinds, from mechanical components to aesthetic elements, right down to the last bolt, as long as they comply with safety and international approval standards. For Utopia there were around fifty crash tests and even more emissions tests, to achieve certification of conformity in various countries.
“The customer is our true employer”, we remember in signs hanging on the walls: it is another of Horacio’s slogans.
Pagani is a family company and customers are part of it. “Customers – exemplifies Francesco Perini – very often want to express a part of themselves through the cars they purchase. There are more obvious aspects, such as bodywork, interiors, paintwork, but other more extreme ones such as finishes, materials, dedicated components” . But we don’t stop there: we also get perfectly tailor-made cars. And so the ‘grand complications’ division was born, dedicated to special projects. Like for example the Huayra Codalunga or the Pagani Imola, works of art in very few examples.
The search for beauty does not stop at cars: there is Pagani Arte, the creative and interior design space for planes, helicopters, yachts and suites, all in the name of research into shapes, styles and materials. Above all, of emotions.
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