Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Pagani Huayra

This is the most-anticipated super car of 2012, and the best part is... ITS COMING TO THE USA!!!!! I have always love Pagani and I adore the Zonda. It was the perfect blend of power, lightness,  crazy styling, gorgeous interior, and exclusivity. The Zonda, however, is now dead. In its place, however, comes the new Huayra is almost here. The name is pronounced why-ra and there is no doubting that it looks absolutely fantastic. Its something you cannot describe, but i found myself spending hours just looking at the damn thing. Even the purely functional bits are beautiful; the side mirrors, for instance, are shaped like a teardrop and are made from carbon fiber. The interior is equally astonishing, swathed in sumptuous leather with amazing carbon fiber and aluminium accents. Im not sure there has ever been a better interior, except for the last Zonda F Roadster. Like the new Ford Mustang, you have the ability to choose the color of the instruments from many different shades. Even the key is interesting: it is a scale model of the car that cracks in half to reveal the key. The driver then puts the key into the slot on the dashboard. It rather looks like someone's small Huayra has smashed into your dashboard.
This is the first Pagani with an airbag mounted in the steering column, which is an indication of the company's new goal: to sell cars in the USA. This will be the first time that a Pagani will be on sale in the US and I think that it will work out very well for them. George Clooney will probably buy one. To get the car to the Uninted States, the car has to pass many safty tests and complete someting like 300,000 miles in one car to make sure that it can withstand the terrors of everyday driving.
The best thing about this car is that it will be built utterly without compromise. For example, the speedometer plate will not not just be a stamed pieces of metal but one that is handmade. Not even Rolls-Royce do that. The new Huayra will use a massive twin-turbo 5.98 litre Mercedes-Benz V-12 engine.  As you can hera in the video that goes along with this post, the Huayra's engine makes a very unique and tremendous sound. However, i think that it sounds absolutely awful. It might just be the quality of the video, but it sounds like someone sneezing for a very long time. In addition to the sound, i would think that the turbo lag would get a little bit annoying for those who have driven the naturally-aspirated Zondas. Im not sure, however, that the person who buys a car like this will be as interested in the sound as in the raw power. The Huayra develops-get this- 700 bhp! thats 10 more than a Lamborghini Aventador, 90 more than a Ferarri 599, and 60 more than a Fararri FF. In addition, as you can see in the video, the "active aerodynamics are very fun to watch. the air brake seems to be very high tech and means that it will stop, in the words of Jeremy Clarkson, "only faster if you hit a tree!"
There are, however, somethings that im not too sure about. First, I dont like the name. The title Zonda was something that was almost as expressive as the car but Huayra just sounds odd. Secondly, i wished that they had kept up their tradition in the Zonda and fitted it with a manual. The old Zonda racing gearboxes were great and I just wish that they could have done the same thing with the Huayra. Lastly, im not sold on the engine. I know that it is immensely powerful and loud, but in my mind Paganis have always been about natural aspiration and split second acceleration. Im also not sure about the price. It it going to cost about $1.4 million, and for a car that is not much faster than a half-of-a-million dollar Lamborghini Aventador, that does seem like a lot.





But i am nit-picking. None of these small details take much away from the Huayra. It is absolutely fantastic and I am told that they already have orders for 51 of them. Horacio Pagani better get started, because this one is going to be a classic.

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