International: Upstart in the Backyard of Italy’s Supercars

To aficionados, the name Pagani is associated with supercars of exceptional performance and a level of craftsmanship achieved by a near-maniacal attention to detail. The price tag might seem crazy, too: the latest model, the Huayra, starts at 989,500 euros, or $1.3 million, before taxes and options.

Paganis “are not cars,” said Alessandro Pasi, deputy director of the Italian edition of Evo, a magazine devoted to high-performance cars. “They are objects bought by people who get pleasure from owning something unique, like a Picasso painting. The more unique the object, the happier they are.”

It is Leonardo da Vinci, not Picasso, whose inspiration is most often cited by the company’s founder, Horacio Pagani, an Argentine-born designer who turned his childhood passion into his profession.

The da Vinci ideal was “that art and science could work hand in hand,” Mr. Pagani, 57, said in an interview at the factory here. “Leonardo’s brilliance was his humanity, his curiosity that made him constantly doubt what he was doing. That’s what’s behind our work.”

The Huayra (pronounced WHY-ra) is the embodiment of the Pagani philosophy. It is named for the Incan god of the winds and inspired, Mr. Pagani said, “by the moment when a plane is accelerating, just when it’s about to take off.”

An observer could be forgiven for thinking that the Huayra looks like something that came flying out of the Batcave. The aerodynamic shape helps the Huayra reach a top speed that Car and Driver estimated at 224 miles an hour, and air brake flaps, which mimic those used by airplanes during landing, help it slow from such an extralegal pace.

In gushing reviews, writers have reveled in the car’s handcrafted details, its carbon-titanium chassis and gullwing doors. Praise has been lavished on the 720-horsepower twin-turbo V-12 engine, developed for Pagani by the AMG group of Mercedes-Benz, and on the 7-speed automated gearbox. There’s a titanium exhaust system, which helps keep the car, at a little more than 3,000 pounds, relatively light.

Inside is an audio system by the Italian company Sonus Faber; premium leather covers the seat and the six matching pieces of luggage that tuck into various nooks. There is also a special key — a miniature model of the Huayra, in aluminum, that costs more than $1,300 each to make.

Mr. Pagani was born in Casilda, Argentina, into a family of bakers. He honed his interest in cars as a boy, carving models out of balsa wood that are in a display case in the factory’s showroom near his single-seater Formula 2 racecar from 30 years ago.

As a university student, Mr. Pagani enrolled in industrial design courses and began a mechanical engineering degree before dropping out to start a design business, which spanned objects as diverse as furniture and camping trailers.

He moved to Italy in 1983 to pursue his dream of designing exotic cars, carrying a letter of introduction from the Argentine driving champion Juan Manuel Fangio, which eventually got him a job with Lamborghini. There, he worked with composite materials, collaborating with the team that built the Countach Evoluzione, a pioneer of carbon-fiber chassis construction.

In 1991 he founded Modena Design, which designed and molded components for companies in the automotive, aerospace and military sectors, while he worked on his first supercar. He chose to stay in an area of Italy that is home to what are today some of his chief competitors: Lamborghini, Maserati and Ferrari.

“To build a supercar here in Modena was an incredible challenge, like climbing a mountain,” Mr. Pagani said.

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