Motor Mouth: A lesson in commitment, from the mouth of a genius

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SAN CESARIO SUL PANARO, Italy—Horacio Pagani does not love his own cars. Oh, he obsesses over every single little detail of their construction; is so passionate about the quality of the cars that bear his name that he etches his autograph into their every nook and cranny; and, when he can’t sleep at night, he’s known to prowl his R&D centre leaving cryptic notes — usually penned on Scotch tape lining the offending body part — for his engineers to decipher in the morning. But he swears up and down that he doesn’t love them.

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That’s because, when you’re trying — many would say succeeding — to build the world’s greatest supercar, a touch of skepticism does not go remiss. So while he positively adores his Porsche Carrera GT — and thinks the Ford GT is the most beautiful car of the last 20 years — he does not love his cars “because it would impair my objectivity.” No doubt Freud would have something to say about loving something so much that one can’t love them at all, but anyone doubting Horacio’s utter and complete commitment just doesn’t know the Pagani story.

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Born in Argentina, he started building balsa wood models of supercars before he was 10, designed his own minibike from scratch by the time he was 16 and, by the tender age of 24, had engineered his own race-winning F2 car. If that’s not audacious enough, imagine showing up on Enzo Ferrari’s doorstep when you’re 28, armed with only a letter from fellow Argentine — not to mention perhaps the greatest race car driver of all time — Juan Manuel Fangio , and then turning down the Scuderia’s race team because you want to design cars right from the get-go. So then, you meander over to Lamborghini and they too offer you a job — obviously Juan Manuel’s recommendation carried some serious weight — but you have to live in a tent for the first few months because you’re basically itinerant. I guess they thought you were just a health nut when you bicycled into work every day.  

Then, after impressing the higher-ups so much that you’re working on the LM002 and the Evoluzione version of the iconic Countach within just a couple of years, you decide to quit because, well, those same higher-ups wouldn’t buy you an autoclave to bake the carbon-fibre that you’re absolutely dead-nuts positive will be the future of supercars. They, if you’re following this story at all, obviously do not. And when they dismiss the whole thing with a wave of “If Ferrari doesn’t have an autoclave, why should we have one?” you, well, quit. Yes, if you’re thinking that walking away from Lamborghini is, as I intimated, a little mad, you’re not alone.  

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So then you buy your own autoclave — that you’re still using today, by the way—when just a few years earlier you were living in a tent and riding a bicycle to work. Then, in no specific order, you start one company (Modena Design, which conceives everything from ski boots to automotive dashboards), open yet another company (the now-famous Pagani Automobili), engineer a way to weave titanium into carbon-fibre (which makes it both stronger and less brittle) and then, just for good measure, design your first car (the epoch-changing Zonda), which pretty much every scribe of the day agrees is the greatest supercar of its time.

That would have been enough for most folks to call it a day, but not for somebody who, I’ll remind you, doesn’t love his cars. So you design an automotive interior that belongs in the Guggenheim with a completely exposed gear shift mechanism — look here for what true automotive ingenuity looks like — that somehow makes 67 pieces of chrome and steel move in such unison as to make a Swan Lake -worthy pas de deux look like a drunken stumble in the park. Then you somehow manage to convince the ultimate in teutonic bean-counters, Mercedes-Benz, to homologate its great, hulking twin-turbo V12 for 2026 emissions certification — a hugely expensive endeavour the company isn’t even attempting for its own lineup — just so they can sell you, what, 50 engines a year.  

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And, because your passion still refuses to abate, you then build an entire new state-of-the-art factory, come up with yet another, even more high-tech carbon-fibre formulation — Carbo-Triax HP62 — that lets you, for as far as I can see, build the first roadster in history that is both stiffer and lighter than the coupe it is based on. Then you buy back a whole bunch of your own cars — all the Zonda Cinques, Zonda Rs, and Zonda Fs that you couldn’t afford to keep when you were just starting out — at double and treble what you sold them for just so you can build a museum to the cars you don’t love. And because, well, you know there are 24 hours in a day, you design your own sinks and liquid soap dispensers for the toilet in, you guessed it, carbon-fibre because someone might have forgotten how special your cars are in the few minutes they took to hit the loo.  

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So no, Horacio Pagani doesn’t love his cars. But he has devoted his entire life to them. All automakers should not love their cars so much.

Oh, and just one last thing. Paganis aren’t just pretty and fast. In fact, Horacio has so much confidence in what he builds that, when some crazy Canuck lands at his door and threatens to thrash his latest baby, the Huayra Roadster BC, within an inch of its life, he just gave me the test mule with 72,000 hard kilometres on it — 40,000 of which are on the racetrack, including setting the lap record for production cars at Spa-Francorchamps — with little more than an oil change and new spark plugs. I can assure you that Aston Martin, Lamborghini, or Maserati have never lent out a car for a journalistic review with that kind of mileage. Pagani is truly unique.