Supercar Review: 2021 Pagani Huayra Roadster BC

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APPENNINO EMILIANO, Italy—Editors hate it when you start a road test with specs. Absolutely loathe it. Numbers, they say, are too dry. Not emotive enough. Antiseptic even. If you really want to connect with readers, they say, start with something emotive.

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Especially with supercars. Feats of derring-do, speed limits exceeded, and brake pads fried, according to said editors, always garner more of those all-important clicks than anything to do with numerals. It’s a rule, they claim, that predates even the blogosphere, the tabloids of yore screaming sensation long before they get to reciting specification.

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Supercar Review: 2021 Pagani Huayra Roadster BC Back to video

Nonetheless, I will start this dissertation on Pagani’s incredible Roadster BC with two simple numbers: 791 horsepower; and 1,250 kilograms. The simplest of long divisions say that’s but 1.6 kilograms — 1.58 actually, the need for double-digit exactitude explained in just a minute — that every horsepower has to motivate. If you’re stuck back in Imperial measure, that’s just a mite under 3.5 pounds for every pony.

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Even for those unfamiliar with automotive power-to-weight ratios, having one horsepower for every kilogram-and-a-half of car should sound generous. Applying a little context, consider that the 5.0-litre Mustang GT you remember as “really pinning me into my seat” has just one horsepower to move a whopping 3.6 kilograms. For those with a taste for exotics — and, of course, the means to indulge in said exotica — Lamborghini’s fleetest track weapon, the absolutely amazing Huracan Performante, has to lug around 2.15 kilos for every one of its 5.2L V10’s 640 hp. Indeed, if you want to get into Pagani territory, you have to move all the way up to that Ferrari’s ferocious SF90 Stradale — you remember, the car I described just last week as being utterly “vicious” — which, just by coincidence mind you, has to motivate the same 1.58 kilograms with each of its 986 horsepower.

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Now the fact that they both sport exactly the same performance-governing metric doesn’t mean the two cars are even remotely alike. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine two cars that feels so markedly dis similar, much more so than say, any competitive models from Ford and General Motors, or BMW and Audi. The Ferrari, for instance, is powered by a high-revving turbocharged V8 fortified by three electric motors; while the Pagani is muscled around by a monstrous Mercedes-AMG twin-turboed V12 that eschews all those screaming rpm for 774 pound-feet of tarmac-melting torque.

And they feel so different. One — no surprise here, the Ferrari — is frenetic while the other, the Pagani this time, is the very definition of “relentless.” To put an au courant Olympic metaphor in place, think of the SF90 as eight Jamaican female sprinters — they who swept all three 100-metre podium positions, all fast-twitch muscle fibres and caffeinated immediacy. The Roadster BC, meanwhile, is more like 12 ginormous Samoan wrestlers who may have been smoking just a little of the ganja. One bursts off the line with an immediacy that is almost frightening, smoking through the first 100 km/h faster than you can switch gears; while the other, well, it takes a fraction of a second or so to get, uhm, organized. But once those twelve AMG’ed cylinders all starting pushing in the same direction, well, let me tell you, Newton’s laws of physics really don’t stand a chance. Punching the throttle of a Pagani, I think, is as close as a road-based vehicle gets to the relentlessness of a SpaceX booster rocket. The thing just doesn’t ever let up.

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What’s even more interesting is what happens when the road gets twisty. The Ferrari — despite weighing 1,570 kilos — feels light. the Pagani, as I said at the beginning of this spec-reciting session, is light. And you can feel that lack of avoirdupois at the wheel. It never feels twitchy, just eager. As if it just can’t wait to get to the apex so you can get those 12 (now completely alert) Samoans back on the job. In slow hairpins, there’s amazing mechanical grip thanks to its super-sticky Pirelli P Zero Trofeo Rs — 265/30R20s in front; and extra-meaty 355/25R21s in the rear — kept flat on the road by the Roadster’s sophisticated suspension.

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At higher speeds, meanwhile, up to 500 kilograms of aerodynamic down force push the Pagani into even closer association with tarmac. Even the exhaust system gets in on the plot, two extra exit pipes from the catalytic convertor actually aimed at the undertray to exploit a “blown diffuser principle,” all, again, to increase the weight holding tires to road. All told, Pagani says that the Roadster BC is capable of an incredible 1.9 Gs in a corner: I have no idea how many of those Gs we were pulling through the countless tournantes around Castelvetro di Modena, but I’m pretty sure they were illegal even in Italy.

Even more impressive is what happens when the road gets lumpy. Most supercars, frankly, fall completely apart when faced with the moonscapes that pass for roads these days (seemingly even in normally pristine Italy in these COVID-19 days). Not the Pagani. Part of that is the Formula-One-like computer-controlled rocker arm-actuated double wishbone suspension I mentioned earlier. Its ability to eliminate body roll, while at the same time providing at least some compliance, is nothing short of amazing.

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But the real magic here is Pagani’s chassis magic. Remember, the BC is a roadster, there being no roof to enhance structural rigidity. In normal circumstances, a sports car with its top lopped off is either heavier — thanks to the reinforcements needed to regain the rigidity lost from dropping its lid — or squidgier, the framework literally bending under the enormous suspension and cornering loads.

Not this roadster. In fact, because of some space-age — and proprietary — materials, the BC is lighter and stiffer than the coupe it’s based on. Thanks to Pagani’s trademark Carbo-Titanium — in which titanium filaments are woven into the carbon fibre to make it both stronger and less brittle — and new lighter and even stronger Carbo-Triax, the BC’s chassis is utterly rigid. Francesco Perini, head of concept & composite design, claims torsional rigidity is up some 12 per cent, which makes the Roadster BC’s chassis about as imperturbable as the Laurentian Shield.

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Truth be told, though, as magnificent as the Roadster BC’s performance is, it is not, in and of itself, adequate reason to pay up to 3,085,000 Euros — $4.6 million Canadian, at today’s exchange rate — for a Roadster BC. Nope, the reason some six lucky — and very rich — Canadians have spent roughly six or seven times the cost of that aforementioned Ferrari is because a Pagani’s interior is like sitting in the Guggenheim, everything within view literally art of the most exquisite quality.

I’m not talking “automotive art,” which, if you were being generous, could be applied to anything from a BMW to a Maserati. No, we’re talking the ultimate in craftsmanship here. Imagine all the intricacy and delicate attention to detail of a Rolex — or, better yet, something from Piaget — only magnified into an automotive interior that dazzles you every time you get behind the wheel. The exposed gear selector linkage — 67 individual links, for cripes’ sake — that engages the seven-speed automated single-clutch transmission speaks to the same craftsmanship that makes the Patek Phillipe Grand Complication’s “skeletonization” worth upwards of a million bucks.

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From the milled infotainment surround to the hand-stitched leather door trim, absolutely everything about the Pagani is bespoke. Hell, even the emblems — both inside and out — are machined from a solid block of aluminum rather than just cast and then polished. No other car at any price comes close to a Pagani’s build quality.

And that’s why you pay upwards of a Rosedale Road mansion or a Kitsilano back-split for the right to park your behind in a Pagani Roadster BC. To your rear is a great, huffing Mercedes-AMG V12 cascading with torque. To the front is an interior that would make a Rolls-Royce — of any vintage! — embarrassed with envy. And it all hurtles ’round Italian hairpins with a speed that makes Lamborghinis jealous.