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Pagani Huayra: Million-dollar sports car

Dan Neil for The Wall Street Journal

Dan Neil writes in the Rumble Street column for The Wall Street Journal that something strange is going on at Pagani Automobili: This is an outfit about the size of a Jiffy Lube, doing business on the Via dell'Artigianato--"the street of artisanal craftsmanship," if I parse it right--in Modena, the heart of Italian supercar country. In my two days at atelier Pagani, I did not see 20 souls. There's Luca, the press guy; a couple of receptionists; a few workers here, a couple of sons there; and Mrs. Pagani, who clicks across the polished floors in Milanese death heels. Where the hell is everybody?

Dan Neil for The Wall Street Journal

Everybody else turns out to be one guy, Horacio Pagani, a mild, 56-year-old Argentine designer, carbon composites expert and savant of some kind, though I'm at a loss to say which kind. In fact, I would like to discuss Mr. Pagani's case with a clinical neuroscientist. Here is a man who, without benefit of formal education in aerodynamics or engineering--a European businessman who doesn't speak English, a designer who can't tell you what a PDF is--has managed to pluck from the naked air of his intellect this thing called the Pagani Huayra, a gull-winged, $1.2 million hypercar, a painterly masterpiece with comic book performance, a zero-altitude fighter jet and about the most radical way to get from Point A to 225 mph I've ever driven.

Dan Neil for The Wall Street Journal

The Huayra (pronounced WHY-ra, the name recalling an Andean wind spirit) is--if I may rehabilitate an old word--an aeromobile. Pagani's work is well known to enthusiasts. His first car, the Zonda, set the template, with a hand-built Mercedes-Benz AMG V12 situated amidships and extreme weight savings driven by the use of carbon fiber, titanium and aluminum. The final version of the Zonda, the 7.3-liter, 800-hp R Evolution, which the company continues to build as a club racer, recently lapped the 21-kilometer Nurburgring in 6:47 minutes (for reference, 37 seconds faster than a Ferrari Enzo).

Dan Neil for The Wall Street Journal

The Huayra (about 3,100 pounds, 700+ hp, 737 pound-feet of torque, 0-186 mph in about 18 seconds) is a very different creature, and among the things I think are of neuroscientific interest is the leap in aesthetics between the two cars. The Zonda looks like what it is, a domesticated Le Mans prototype, a hard-eyed courtesan in a carbon-fiber corset laced with an assassin's piano wire. Badass, not pretty. The Huayra is beautiful, sculptural, harmonious, enlightened, as elemental as the air for which it is named. Nothing upon which the eye may feast is sacrificed to machine logic or the technical demands of 200-mph speeds. And, apparently, the shape of the Huayra fell out of Pagani's head almost fully formed.

Dan Neil for The Wall Street Journal

Pagani, who came to Italy in 1983 to work as a technician for Lamborghini, idolizes Leonardo da Vinci. Yeah, well, Leonardo had the advantage of knowing his helicopter would never be built. At least he knew he wasn't going to fly it. Pagani, by contrast, has to get his shimmering vision of a car past the U.S. Department of Transportation. I want you to know I've seen a lot of million-dollar artisanal hypercars. I've seen massively overblown V12 engines before, heard the supersonic yelps of twin turbos in perdition. I've seen laser-etched monogrammed titanium bolts all torqued to face the same precise direction; I've seen carbon-titanium monocoques, gold-anodized aluminum pushrod suspension links, chrome-moly subframes with titanium heim-joints and obsessive, horological displays of precision machining. Seen it. Bugatti EB110, Koenigsegg, Spyker, to name a few. None of those cars does what this car does.

Dan Neil for The Wall Street Journal

Get this: By virtue of four computer-controlled, electrically actuated flight control surfaces--elevators at the trailing edge of the car and ailerons in the nose, between the front wheel wells--the Huayra aero-stabilizes. The control surfaces, acting independently or together with a variable angle of attack of up to 20 degrees (front) and 40 degrees (rear), move the car's center of aerodynamic balance around to compensate for the forces of pitch, roll, yaw and high-speed lift. What does that mean? It means that when you're ripping around the Italian countryside like a fleeing bank robber, with the Huayra's turbo wastegates exploding, tearing the veil with the sound of angels having a mid-air collision, there is somehow a deft, invisible finger holding the car to the pavement.

Dan Neil for The Wall Street Journal

You come up hard to a tight right corner, heading uphill. Brush the brakes and set the wheel and throttle. The right-side aileron and stabilizer deploy, squeezing more downforce onto the right-side, foot-wide Pirellis. Add gas. Huhhhh-h-h-h…. That's a nice, tidy 1.5-g cornering right there. As the car straightens out and gains speed, the airfoils automatically trim out to reduce drag. This car generates real, live, Le Mans-quality ground effects, and it is ferocious. My neck may never walk again. Additionally, the Huayra has a hydraulically actuated, dynamic front ride-height system that raises the nose of the car during extreme braking, compensating for the weight transfer and giving the front wings more range of suspension travel through which to exert downforce.

Dan Neil for The Wall Street Journal

Of course, I have many questions. How fast can these systems--the flight-control CPU and actuators, the active front ride-height--react to the welter of signals coming in from the car's various accelerometers, sensors and stability programming? The active aero works in a range between 50-175 mph, where things happen pretty fast. Even a small degree of system hysteresis--lag, in other words--could potentially unbalance the car. Who wrote these algorithms and how thoroughly have they been tested? Is the dynamic aero hardware worth its cost in complication and weight? In order to verify the Huayra's claims, I would need a lot of instrumented data and at least a month in the Cote d'Azur. Pagani says that Huayra prototypes are currently wrapping up a million-kilometer testing and validation cycle before the car comes to the U.S. midyear, 2013. But let's assume it all works as advertised. That presents two clinical possibilities: One, the Huayra is the greatest feat of intuitive engineering in the recent history of automobiles and it should be written up in some textbook of cognitive science. Or else it represents a masterpiece of communication.

Dan Neil for The Wall Street Journal

After all, Pagani did not design this car alone. The engine and hydroformed titanium exhaust (MHG Fahrzeugtechnik) are built in Germany, the gearbox (transverse-mounted, single-clutch, seven-speed Xtrac automated manual) is built in Britain. Outside of the carbon chassis and body panels, virtually every piece of the car--from the forged Avional suspension rockers to the crazy, clarinet-like alloy climate switches; from the custom-built Pirellis to the exposed, milled-aluminum sequential shiftgate between the seats--comes from suppliers within about 100 kilometers of Modena, and Pagani has leaned on them heavily.

Dan Neil for The Wall Street Journal

Still, Pagani, who is not even comfortable with email, had to convey exactly what he wanted to his suppliers and his mouse-wielding engineers, and some of his ideas must have seemed unusual, even odd. Note the way the thin ellipsoid of the Pagani logo is stated and re-stated in the cabin details, leading to the curious retro-sci-fi instrument panel, which looks like it was pried off of Ming The Merciless's jet ski. And yet, the resulting car is so singular, so charismatic, so uncompromised, it seems less about Pagani's draftsmanship than his ability to direct and inspire. It should have taken an army to build this car. But when you look around, all you see is the man himself.