Forget your Ferraris and your Porsches. If it's a real supercar you want, the only car in the running is the Pagani, writes Nick Hall
The winding road of motoring folklore is littered with the sun-bleached corpses of grand ideas. Many newcomers have dreamed of toppling Ferrari or McLaren, and ended up with little more than a bankruptcy hearing and a few flashy shots of their overpriced prototype in the motoring press.
"To make a small fortune in the car business you need to start with a big one" is one of the grand old motoring clichés. But, with the Zonda C12S, Horacio Pagani achieved what eluded the rest and, for a while at least, produced the yardstick by which all supercars are measured.
The Pagani Zonda truly was the best car in the world - ever - before the Enzo, the Porsche Carrera GT and the McLaren Mercedes SLR hit the scene. It still takes the fight to newer opposition more than a decade after legendary F1 driver Juan Manuel Fangio helped with the initial sketches. Besides, these are all sold out anyway.
So, even if you have the cash and a propensity for vulgar overspending that only Jennifer Lopez could truly understand, the Zonda is the only available car in its class. For the record, it costs €451,000 from its British importer, Euro Sportscars, and you'd probably make Brian Cowen's week with the Vehicle Registration Tax (VRT) you'd pay on it.
The Zonda is about as relevant to the man in the street as space tourism, but it's ready and waiting if your numbers come up.
The price tag - and the fact there aren't many more than 50 in the world right now - did nothing to ease my nerves on my way to the test. I was about to drive a hypercar that cost twice as much as my flat, with 555bhp on tap, on public roads, having scrambled insurance only the night before, taking full responsibility for any damage.
It was a dream that could, in a heartbeat, spiral into a raging cold sweat nightmare. But laying eyes on the Zonda and hearing the engine blast into life sent the nerves scuttling sheepishly to the corner.
It helped seeing the Zonda from the rear - it's far and away its most spectacular angle. That centrally housed Gatling-gun exhaust has become its signature and as sure a sign as any that this is a piece of automotive art that can only come from an off-the-wall niche company such as Pagani.
Beneath the mesh rear panels there's a seductive glimpse of the barrel-sized and highly polished silencers, too. And the front is pure Le Mans from the mid-1980s, with a steeply raked nose and carbon splitter lunging for the horizon even when this machine stands still.
In truth the profile isn't too pretty. The bubble-style canopy sits too far forward, but on the move most people get about 0.0001 seconds to take in the proportions as it flashes past.
There is a distinct video game feel about the Zonda that makes me go quicker than is necessarily wise. Cars fly back towards me and the slightest nudge on the wheel or prod on the throttle brings a response that I normally feel only on consoles in the land of make-believe.
On at least one occasion the needle finds its way well into three figures, as fellow road users eagerly pull out of the way and then desperately try to accelerate for a better look.
One game Mercedes driver flogs his SL to its limit in order to drool over the rear end of my steed before he too falls away. Nothing can come close.
The Zonda is so meticulously styled throughout that it feels like a 1960s Tomorrow's World projection of what cars could have looked like about now. It retains elements of those brave forward-looking sketches, with a fighter plane exterior, air vents on stalks, toggle switches and the flashy logo on the satin-finish aluminium console that stars alongside sofa-grade leather, carbon-fibre and other exotic materials.
It's all beautifully done - ornate metal pedals looking like they belong on a grand piano and traditional leather binding straps both inside and out. Anybody who sees the car along the way is forced to scrape their jaw from their lap, it's that dramatic.
The Zonda's rivals wail like high-pitched banshees when they fire up - Porsche and Ferrari have opted for a higher revving approach. Instead, Pagani went for the throaty, rumbling 7.3-litre, AMG-tuned Mercedes V12, that sounds like Vesuvius warming up for an eruption as the whole car trembles. It's a delicious noise that's best appreciated from the outside - the well-insulated cockpit is a relatively quiet place, like the eye of the storm.
Despite the lavish choice of engines, the Zonda ended up weighing a svelte 1350kg, lighter than the Ferrari and Porsche successors courtesy of Pagani's main business as a carbon-fibre whiz. He's used the material for the chassis and just about everywhere else to save weight, while not compromising on creature comforts in the cockpit. The result is a guided missile with a Club Class ride.
Roland, from the British importer, came along for the ride, and to make sure the car and I didn't disappear into the east European black market. He reckons two of his customers use theirs as daily transport, which seems perfectly feasible from the plush yet supportive driving seat.
The Pagani is set up for everyday driving. There's a space programme's worth of Mercedes' electronics permanently standing by to help out and catch mistakes others in its class might not forgive so easily.
The trick chassis has finely honed aerodynamics concentrating on grip, rather than straightline speed or appearance, with the multi-foil rear wing proving the point and providing massive downforce at the back end. These combine with a modified version of the traction control system charged with keeping AMG's recent selection of super-powerful and heavy saloons on the road. Here it handles a whopping 749 Newton metres (Nm) or torque, which would otherwise shred the 18-inch Michelins and leave the tarmac with emotional scars.
The gadgets even overcome the tricky problem of low-speed driving. The Zonda blips the throttle to prevent an embarrassing mid-town stall if the revs dip below 500rpm. This means that it will trickle round town in sixth gear as obediently as a drugged circus tiger, while the Prancing Horse would fidget and stamp its way round through heavy traffic.
With an even remotely competent driver at the helm and a clear stretch of road, this car will rewrite anyone's definition of quick. The 60mph mark comes in a reality-twisting 3.6 seconds, the in-gear acceleration is as violent as a shark attack. And all the time it just sticks to the road, sticking to any line I choose.
It's good for 210 mph, which from our test was a real-world figure. It could have gone quicker had Pagani wanted, but he sacrificed record-breaking top-end performance for handling and usability (can you refer to 210mph as being useable?), which is the key to its success. For my money the user-friendly and flexible Zonda pips the Enzo and takes the fight to Porsche and Mercedes with gusto.
Italy has a new supercar champion, for a while at least, and Horacio's brave gamble on his radical design has paid off in spades. Pagani is one of those rare new breeds that is clearly here to stay.