Perhaps, the thing that impresses most about the Huayra is its suspension, with double wishbones and Öhlins dampers. The dampers are adjustable – by fiddling around with them under the clamshell bodywork, not by pressing a button in the cockpit – but the softer setting selected for our car works to perfection: there’s virtually no roll, but an amazing amount of compliance, so that you can deploy all of that firepower over bumpier sections of asphalt, without feeling as if you’ll be catapulted into The Dolomites, only for a puzzled climber to find a titanium retaining bolt oozing out of a glacier in 50 years’ time.
The hydraulically assisted steering is suitably meaty and certainly far heavier in feel than a contemporary Ferrari, but while it seems almost too heavy at first, it doesn’t take long to acclimatise – test driver Testi’s penchant for body building may explain this trait. Pagani offer customers a lighter rack and a heavier one; I’d either stick with our car’s setting or try the lighter one, which is all part of the build process when you’re dropping seven figures or thereabouts on your supercar.
The carbon-ceramic brakes, too, can be tweaked for each customer’s personal preferences and I’d definitely have a tinker about with them: it wasn’t so much that there was any kind of dead spot as you can sometimes feel on Lamborghinis or that there was anything wrong with their robust performance; it was more that the pedal feel lacked crisp definition right through the length of its travel. Testi suggested the more aggressive brake pads could be a solution, as our car had a comfort-oriented set-up, a “Mr Pagani set-up”, as he put it.
The thing is, an extreme car like the Huayra is always going to have its flaws. But as a supercar, as a thing that brightens other people’s day just by being parked at the side of the road and as a machine that gives its driver a life-affirming buzz every time he presses the accelerator, the Huayra takes some beating.
The fact that such a small company has turned out such an extraordinary supercar, one that takes the fight to the best in the world, only adds to the feeling that this is something truly special.
This, of course, comes at a price: the Huayra costs €849,000 (Rs 7.3 crore), plus local taxes, but I’m going to attempt to tell you that that’s good value: there are 4,700 components, all of which are unique, says Pagani; each and every one of the Huayra’s 1,200 bolts is made from titanium and stamped with the Pagani logo – the bolts cost a staggering €90,000 (Rs 77 lakh) for the prototype, though economies of scale have obviously dropped that figure for the production parts. The aluminium components – parts such as the name-plate on the car’s rump and the instrument binnacle that tilts with the adjustable steering column – are milled from solid billets, while the clocks are crafted by Rolex; they look fantastic, even if you can’t really read them when your eyeballs are being rotated in their sockets.
As we leave, Pagani rolls up a huge design sketch of the Huayra and scrawls over one corner in black marker pen. ‘Dear Ben,’ it says, ‘remember that passion and dreams are the energy of our life. Yours, Horacio Pagani.’ It’s the mantra he lives by and it shines through in the cars Pagani builds.
The tube for the poster is about a metre long and – I’ll tell you what – it’s a right old hassle lugging it through Bologna airport, sneaking it past the cabin crew and squeezing it into an overhead locker that threatens to spill its contents all over your economy seat. I drag it all the way home to discover that the only wall long enough to display the sketch is on the outside of my house. But for two days the world thought I was wealthy enough to drive a Pagani Huayra. I lived that dream, felt that passion, no matter how briefly.
One day, Horacio. One day.
