La Pagani Huayra di Project CARS

[VELOCIPEDE]

-> http://www.projectcarsgame.com/home/pagan-soul-is-the-pagani-huayra-bc-the-coolest-hypercar-in-project-cars

 

From penniless floor-sweeper to creator of the world’s finest hypercars, the Pagani story is the myth of a man that reinforces the legend … 

Project CARS boasts over 100 cars hand-built to exacting standards. Of those, there are a handful that can be labelled a hypercar. But there’s the thing about simulation; you don’t need impossible odds—or apply for traffic duty at the Dubai Police Department (where you’ll find enough hypercars to satisfy all your worldly desires)—to lift open the light-as-a-feather gull-wings of the Pagani Huayra BC and slide into the steampunk-like moving-art exhibit that is the BC’s cockpit. You can go one step further, too; you can fire-up the sonorous V12 and thrash it around your favorite track, push the BC to its natural limits—and beyond, if the notion of wrapping one around a tree doesn’t upset you too much. 

 

Lewis Hamilton, on a wet night in Monaco not so long ago, damaged his bespoke purple (yes) Zonda 760LH (LH for Lewis Hamilton) that features a manual box (oh, yes) Zen-linked to 760 fire-and-brimstone-churning horses of the apocalypse: unlike you, though, he had to pay for the damage.

So What’s A Hypercar Anyway?
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The world of hypercars has more in common with the incomprehensible market of modern art than it does motor cars. There are ephemeral qualities that escape labeling (and pricing), escape simple horsepower (and drag). Words, numbers, descriptions, all are useless when trying to explain the passion evoked by a hypercar, useless when trying even to explain their very existence. 

So how do you distinguish between a hypercar, and a supercar, anyway? The term hypercar was coined in the 1990s by a group of hippy environmentalists in the Rocky Mountains for cars that were energy efficient enough to save the planet. Clearly, 1,000hp supercars that boast six miles to the gallon don’t really fit the (six figure) bill. The term supercar, meanwhile, was first used in 1920 in the Times of London in an advert for the Ensign 6—no MPG is available for that car, but given it sported a massive Bentley 6.7 litre lump, six to the gallon is probably optimistic. Hypercars are, of course, by definition supercars, but only a handful of supercars get to be hypercars. Who decides? Not the dude in the dodgy checked suit trying to flog you a second-hand supermarket goer, for sure. Super-exclusivity, cutting-edge design, stratospheric prices, infinitesimal production numbers, and quick as lightning—that’s the bare minimum required. Porsche’s 918 Spyder, McLaren’s P1, Ferrari’s LaFerrari? Hypercars one and all. The Pagani Huayra BC? By any standard, yes, it’s a fellow traveler in this exotic club where the folks waiting outside in the rain are richer than Rockefeller.

The BC isn’t the most expensive hypercar in Project CARS; it’s also not the quickest (though it does hit the 230mph barrier that is the current gold standard); and it won’t get to 100kmh the fastest (it gets there in under three seconds, though, and that’s the magical number). So what makes this car so special? The answer is Horacio Pagani.

A striking part of the Pagani brand is how quickly it has joined the stratosphere of hypercar-makers such as Ferrari, Porsche, and McLaren. These marques (before they became brands) won at Le Mans, dominated in Formula One—racing pedigrees, in the case of Ferrari, and Porsche, that stretch back to when motor-racing was still in its infancy. So how did Pagani enter this elite club so quickly—Pagani, whose first car debuted in 1999, and whose cars have never won any major motor-racing series? ​The answer is Horacio Pagani.

.Like Enzo Ferrari and Ferdinand Porsche, Mr. Pagani seems to have a mystique that extends beyond his sublime creations; the man is the myth behind the brand. To understand the appeal of Pagani the car, you have to know Pagani the man. He’s not unique in this; there’s always something inimitable about the great car-makers, and the similarities between Horacio Pagani and Ferdinand Porsche are really striking. Ferdinand Porsche, who, unable to afford the tuition fees at Vienna University, took a job as a janitor so that he could sneak into the engineering classes; Porsche, who landed his first job based on a letter of recommendation. Horacio Pagani’s story is a similar rags-to-riches saga that reads like a combination of Harold Robbins and Arthur Hailey. 

The Hollywood Treatment
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A boy from an immigrant family in Argentina, at a prodigious young age, begins building his own supercars from balsa wood, plastic, glue, and—when his father, the small-town baker, is short of cash—flour and water. Flip forward a few years to 1978, and the boy, now a young man in his early 20s and fervent in his desire to one day build his own supercar, constructs a Formula 2 by hand. Having never seen an actual Formula 2 nor ever attended a race, he uses a stained copy of the rule book to design and construct the car. On its debut, he meets Argentina’s greatest-ever driver, Juan Manuel Fangio. Fangio recognizes a spark in the young lad and, when informed of his desire to leave for Italy to pursue his crazy dream of building a supercar, the five-time Formula One World Champion wishes him well and writes a personal letter of recommendation. 

In Italy, ‘la recomendazione’ is an indispensable leverage. Except it doesn’t help Horacio Pagani. Not at first. In 1983, Pagani and his wife, Cristina, are newly-arrived immigrants in the land of Pagani’s grandparents, living in a caravan-park near the provincial city of Como, and working any job that happens to come their way. In the evenings, spent and exhausted in his leaking caravan, Pagani painstakingly pens letters to Ferrari, Lamborghini, and every other legendary Italian supercar manufacturer, begging for a chance, a job, an interview, a foot in the door.

“We were penniless," Pagani tells The Independent in 1999. “We survived by doing menial jobs.”
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With his letter from Fangio, Pagani keeps knocking on doors until, finally, someone at Lamborghini gives in to this incessant young man who doesn’t seem to understand what no means in Italian. “He finally said I could come in and sweep the floors in the engineering department,” Pagani recalls. “I said, fine, but one day I’m going to make a car that is better than yours. He just laughed.” 

Sweeping floors at Lamborghini in 1983 to creating an eponymous supercar by 1999; ambition fueled by genius—and hard work. The young lad shows up at 6AM every day and leaves at 8PM every night. First in, last out. A janitor, just like Porsche, there on a recommendation from a powerful backer, just like Porsche. In no time at all, he’s head of the material composite department focused on the design of the hypercar of 1985, the Lamborghini Countach Evolution. For a man who’d molded wood with his hands as a boy, working on the composites for Lamborghini is a labor of love. But there’s more to young Pagani than a love of material, more than a willingness to work harder than anyone else, more than ambition, more than political nous, more than an aesthetic understanding of what makes a lump of steel desirable; there is also an astute businessman. Seeing opportunity, he invites Lamborghini to invest in an autoclave. Lamborghini reject the idea out of hand. So, in 1991, Pagani decides to venture out on his own; he takes a personal loan—the only one he’d ever take—and founds the Modena Design group. 

The group is immediately successful and is soon supplying carbon fiber elements to Formula One teams and Ferrari’s road-cars just up the road in Maranello. With his financial future secured, it’s time for Pagani to finally get back to the reason why he’d swapped Argentina for Italy in the first place: it’s time to build his supercar.
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In 1992, he founds a new company, Pagani Automobili Modena, hires a small staff, and gets to work. The car that he wants to translate from imagination to carbon fibered reality is the ‘Fangio F1’. Fangio himself is invited in to work as an engineering consultant on the project. For inspiration, Pagani, a man of eclectic tastes, looks not at other supercars; instead, he turns to the precision of Swiss watches, the light-weight materials of fighter jets, he soaks in the retro and yet modern hand-crafted Italian boat-makers Riva, he seeks and finds inspiration from the materials and composites that he creates for F1 in his autoclave, and he molds them around his own unique vision, a vision that he describes as, arte, emozione e tecnologia. Art, emotion, and technology. 

With Fangio acting as his guarantor, Pagani travels to Stuttgart in order to secure the final piece to the jigsaw of his childhood dream: the engine. He comes back to Italy with a contact for the Mercedes-Benz AMG 6-litre V12 lump and, as he would confess to Top Gear Magazine many years later, “When we had the first engine from Mercedes, I realised then that we were {going} in the right direction.”

Fangio had been dead four years by the time Pagani’s first supercar car finally rolls out of the factory. He felt it wrong to name it the Fangio F1; instead, he calls it the Pagani Zonda C12. Zonda … for the wind of the Andes. It debuts at the Geneva Motor Show in April 1999. It is the most powerful, street-legal car in the world. The body of the Zonda is made of carbon fiber and composites and it looks like nothing the motoring press has ever before seen. In a few hours, Pagani’s Zonda has stolen the show, and the legend, the myth of Pagani, is forged.
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In the weeks after the show, the Zonda graces the front covers of dozens of magazines: Evo calls it ‘the most advanced sports car in the world’; others label it a ‘technical masterpiece’; others still just open up their wallets. The first example is sold to an Italian immigrant in Manhattan, a collector of mostly Ferraris, by the name of Benny Caiola. 

The Zonda is so successful that it remains in production until 2011, albeit in tiny volumes: the final number of Zondas sold—in all of its iterations—is 135. On the advice of Benny Caiola, Pagani builds the Zonda F in 2005—F for Fangio: “Today, after years spent in a rigorous search for perfection, the result is the Zonda F, a car that I wish to dedicate to Juan Manuel Fangio, the man who has made everything different,” Pagani said at the time. “For me, the Zonda is Fangio transformed into an automobile.” The F is, for many, the greatest Zonda of them all. 

Benny Caoila
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With the Zonda having reaching the end of its evolution, it’s time for Pagani to build on the legend: it’s time for Pagani to unveil his second concept, the Pagani Huayra. Production is limited to 100, a number that is stipulated by AMG that provides the 6-litre V12 twin-turbo engine capable of 730hp. The car debuts at the Geneva Auto Salon 2011, and by 2015, all 100 examples are sold. The price? $1,400,000. Considering the first Zonda sold for $280,000, the Pagani brand has clearly made colossal strides in a decade. …

Pagani’s next project is to work on the Huayra’s version of the Zonda F. Like the F, the BC is named after a close friend of Pagani, a man whose history is an indelible component of the myth: Benny Caiola. Caiola, who passed away in 2010, had become a close confidant and friend to Pagani, and at the BC’s unveiling in Manhattan in April 2016, Pagani spends the evening paying tribute not to his latest hypercar but to his friend, Benny. Emotion, after all, is the Pagani brand. ​

“The car,” Road and Track reports Pagani saying, “is really the history of relationship between Benny and us.” Pagani went on, “I decided to come back here {New York} to talk to Bettina, his wife, and his children, and I wanted to talk to him about this new car, so I went to see him at the cemetery, and it was very moving.”
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The two men had a lot in common; Benny, too, was an immigrant, coming to New York from Messina, Sicily, as a penniless 17 year old. He, too, worked menial jobs—as a plasterer—before getting into real estate. By the mid-’80s, it wasn’t certain which he owned more of—buildings in Manhattan, or Ferraris at his Pelham Manor estate. Hundreds by the time of his death. 

Benny, after taking delivery of the first Pagani, was so moved by the experience that he felt compelled to write a letter that has pride-of-place at Pagani’s futuristic factory in Modena:

Dear Mr. Pagani

I have been fortunate enough during my lifetime to own some of the finest automobiles on the market. Being an avid collector of Ferrari I had often thought there couldn't be a finer or more exotic vehicle made. That was until I owned a Pagani. This car is the Michelangelo of the industry. I am truly honored to own one.
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I have enclosed a check for $1,000.00. Please treat your mechanics to a fine dinner as a token of my appreciation for their spectacular workmanship. The Pagani is truly a work of art!
Sincerely, Mr. Benny Caiola

The BC is Pagani’s tribute to his friend and first customer, just as the F was a tribute to his friend Fangio. And like the F before it, there is a case to be made for the BC being the world’s greatest hypercar. It’s pointless trying to explain why this car evokes such passion. The weaved carbon fiber, the HiForg aliminium, titanium, Avional, the black anthracite, the sticky microsuede … we are in the realm of the sublime that defies description. Even the wing-mirrors, sculpted to be both an aerodynamic devices and to reflect the eyes of Cristina, Mr. Pagani’s wife, are works of art.
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The price? $2,500,000. That’s about a million more than the Huayra, and for that you get an active adjusting rear spoiler that generates in the region of 500kg of downforce at 200kmh, aerodynamics adjusted by Dallara, and 800hp pushing 1,218kg, top speed of 370kmh, 0-100kmh in 2.8 seconds … there, finally you have your numbers. 

“Numbers are made to be overcome,” Pagani once told Top Gear Magazine. “Of course they are important, but the experience is way more, and it’s not related to numbers.”

The experience. The emotion. The passion.

You can experience the BC for yourself in Project CARS. And that inexplicable something that lives in the soul of the Pagani Huayra BC is yours to discover. But here’s the question: Does the emotion of Pagani translate to the virtual world?
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Take it for a spin and find out for yourself.

[Doc17]

La mia macchina preferita in assoluto. La adoro. Un mix di eleganza e potenza ineguagliabili. La versione BC invece non mi piace particolarmente. Nè carne nè pesce.