In the flesh, parked at Pagani’s low-key booth, the Zonda R is every bit the demented racing car you’d expect it to be. This is the last in a great line of super cars, the logical conclusion to Pagani’s original car: the 1999 Zonda C12. Let’s go look inside its mid-mounted guts.

The headless person at the bar, resting behind a Zonda Cinque, can plop his ass in a Barcelona chair if he so desires, which is just as comfortable as it looks. At least in the short term. For long-term stays, you need thousands of dollars or the company of bankers and Zonda-owners.

The famous Gatling exhausts are back and they have never looked this great.

A key element of the car’s supposedly supple suspension.

The valve cover, until recently marked only with its donor AMG’s emblem, has gained some Zonda branding.

Not your mother’s tires.

The carbon fiber rim of a cooling duct exposed by removal of the carapace.

The Zonda is not light on carbon fiber by any means.

The periscope-shaped air ducts inside the cabin are made of, you guessed it, carbon fiber.

Hood scoop to feed all 7.7 liters of the AMG V12. It has a peculiar resemblance to the exhaust pipes of the just-announced Bentley Mulsanne.

Undoubtedly the world’s greatest looking rearview mirror. The shape was introduced in 2005 for the Zonda F to replace the earlier Zonda C12’s snail eye mirrors.

It is a gorgeous mirror. You have to wonder though what function the LED’s which look like turn indicators serve: the Zonda R is a track car. Although, as you’ve seen with the similarly track-only Maserati MC12 Corsa, Horatio Pagani is perhaps anticipating the gentle and high-speed bending of rules.

Gone are the triple headlights of the Zonda F for these elongated dual units. Surrounding them are a material made by curing cloth and resin in an autoclave commonly known as carbon fiber.

This dark knight, just unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show, brings the heat with a 739 HP 6.0-liter V12, weight chopped down to 2,360 pounds and a 0-to-60 time of three seconds.

Photo Credit: autoblog.nl

In case you forgot, the Zonda R is Pagani's supposed fair-thee well gift to the Zonda name to the tune of 739 HP from its 6.0 liter V12, good for a 0-60 time in three second and top speed of 233 mph. Start liquidating your assets now because the $1.8 million super car will go fast, both literally and figuratively.

[via WCF]

Must. Suppress. Dragons.

Photos via Carplatform

Highlights are at 30 seconds, 2:30 and pretty much everywhere in between. Make sure you have a sturdy book ready to um ... just get it ready.

We totally want to make dragon-love with those four exhaust pipes — Is that wrong?

[via Evo]

It's been a good run, the Pagani Zonda has stoked many a supercar fantasy and plasters the walls of garages and bedrooms everywhere, but all good things must come to an end. The Zonda R is that end and the Zonda is not fading quietly into history. Everything gets turned up to eleven with this final model, 739 HP 6.0-liter V12, 0-to-60 times of three seconds, and a blistering top speed of 233 MPH.

The car also spares no expense, wearing top shelf parts made of titanium and carbon fiber, and the price shows. Only 15 Zonda R's will be available to the public for a mind-blowing $1.8 million, and they're building one extra to keep at the factory. Guess if you're going to go out, you go out big.

[iMotorMag]

Why Cinque? According to the person who posted this news, and the picture above, only five of the beasts is to be made. We'll assume it's going to carry the same 7.3-Liter Mercedes V12 and will perform best at the track, though we'd still try and drive it down Lake Shore if given the chance. If the photo above entices you like it entices us we recommend buying lottery tickets. Now! (h/t to Joe) [TeamSpeed]

A few months back at Top Marques Monaco, I heard some slightly distressing news. Not only would there not be a Pagani Zonda F Roadster available to drive for the foreseeable future, but they also had just five left for sale. And that will be the end of the Zonda, one of the few supercar success stories in recent years. Not quite, in fact, as the Zonda F track project has gathered momentum and we can expect a backslapping, $1 million+ Ferrari FXX-style project. But in terms of the road cars then the end is nigh, and the high-rolling Top Marques show might have pushed it over the edge into extinction. They'll need to build the remaining cars, but that will be that until 2008.

I pretty much dealt with the fact I won't ever get the funds to buy a Zonda long ago, but now I can't have one, not a new one anyway, so if those lottery funds drop into my account right now it is still too late. And that's what confirmed it, I would have had one.

Some people say the Zonda is a little fussy, overly ornate and impractical. It managed to beach itself in inner city Paris on a memorable episode of Top Gear and is hardly the kind of machine you could happily drive round town and leave outside Starbucks. But, had the money popped into my hand, a Zonda F would have found its way into my drive.

The 650 bhp Clubsport version of the Zonda F is a magnificent beast, with a 7.3-litre AMG engine at its core. And when I finally got my invite to the Italian factory to drive the Zonda F hard top, it felt like a casual call from Shakira to see if I was free for dinner and sultry Latin adventures. This is the kind of car that defines careers like mine, it's why we turn up for work.

Pagani worked at Lamborghini as a carbon-fiber specialist and also supplied aerospace companies, but he had a vision for a car. And with the help of legendary driver Juan-Manuel Fangio he honed the Zonda concept for more than a decade before it hit the market in 1999. A brief run in the C12 S in England was a tantalizing look into its talents, but then the full bore Zonda F on Italian soil was something else.

The factory tour showed the precision that went in to each and every component. If the carbon-fiber weave isn't lined up perfectly the whole front section is thrown away, and Pagani has settled on a pace of building just 17 cars a year despite initial projections of 35.

In the flesh it is devastating, with the signature Gatling Gun exhaust at the rear and the cab-forward design of a Group C World Sportscar brought storming into the 21st Century. It's a modern design, using modern materials and intricate touches that could keep a real enthusiast poring over the car for hours with its respective nods to the past age.

Leather straps hold the luggage compartments at bay, the vents sit atop carbon-fiber swan's necks and the pedals look like the came from some 25th Century Grand Piano. The interior is easily overdone, and a muted shade of leather works best with the skeletal binnacle, the ornate, wooden flat-bottom wheel, exposed carbon-fibre and deeply crafted seats. With that aircraft-style central console there's enough jewelery inside this thing without the dramatic finishes on offer.

It's like climbing into a cockpit getting into the Zonda F and the olde world styling touches inside the car give it the instant character it needed to have, a USP to compete with the heritage of Ferrari and Lamborghini.

This car comes packed with electronic assistance, ABS brakes and a carbon-fibre monocoque and an Ohlins and Bilstein suspension set-up designed to soak up bumps in the road rather than jump around like an excited drunk on New Year's Eve.

You can't even stall it, as the car can cruise round town in sixth gear from just 500 revs and will blip the throttle for you to prevent embarrassing gaffes in front of 1000 gawping bystanders. It's amongst the easiest of supercars to drive and it weighs just 1230kg despite its slab-like sides and substantial proportions.

Acceleration, then, is predictably explosive, with the 60mph mark passing in 3.6s and the Zonda F will have racked up 125mph by the time you've counted to 10. We weren't allowed to test the top end speed of 216mph, but the way it blasted through the 100mph mark on a broken ribbon of Italian backroad confirmed it was more than up for the task.

Horatio Pagani was allowed to drive fast, and proved the point himself by diving into the driver's seat and setting off like his hair was on fire, mulching internal organs as I sat bewildered in the passenger seat. He braked later, harder and more aggressively than I ever would have with his half-million Euro show car.

There was the sound of traction control battling with Physics underneath, the dash lit up and then this broad inverted wing just took the line anyway. On track it is apparently a laugh riot, but then you'd need to be loaded beyond all of our wildest dreams to be able to bin your Zonda and the guy that does 20,000km a year in his probably has more fun out of his car than the one that uses it purely for track work.

Because he gets to soak up the noise of that charitably liberated 7.3-liter Mercedes engine blasted through a hydroformed sports exhaust built to F1 standards of fit and finish. At low revs it sounds like distant thunder, strangely insulated from the driver at normal speeds. Give the car its full head, though, and that glorious V12 feels like it's moved inside your inner ear as the car tears up the road.

Those that own a Zonda of any vintage now have a piece of rolling history and it is assured of instant classic status. Now we have to wait for 2008 and the new car, which will almost certainly debut at Geneva, but I do feel a pang of regret that I won't be able to call the factory and order my Zonda with a self-satisfied grin.

Like I say, made me realise that, if the funds were there, I genuinely might have. And the Zonda F joins an ever-growing list of cars I should have owned, if only life were different. If you had the money and thought about it, but didn't, you have missed something truly special. – Nick Hall

[Birmingham, UK-based Nick Hall's Car Hack's Notebook column runs whenever he has a free moment between flogging exotic tuners and supercars on European highways and test tracks. Right now, he's between sips of sherry cocktail in his favorite chaise lounge, positioned somewhere in southern Spain.]

Related:
Car Hack's Notebook: Top of the Top Marques [internal]

Days after leaked images revealed Pagani's new Zonda R clubsport (that's a club we wouldn't mind getting hazed for), official word has come from the Italian supercar builder on its newest model. The track-only Zonda R will get a 750-hp (523 ft-lbs of torque) version of the Mercedes AMG-sourced, 7.3-liter V12 that produces 680 hp in the Zonda F clubsport (594 hp in the street model). It'll be 40 cm longer nose to tail, with a slightly longer wheelbase. More pics to come from the land of the midnight cheese products. – Mike Spinelli

[via Autovisie.nl]

Related:
Geneva Pre-Show: Pagani Zonda R Club Racer [internal]

Now here's something. According to the super Swedes at Sportbilen.se, this is the car Pagani plans to show off in Geneva [NOTE: Actually, it's a conceptual rendering by a design student. Carry on NOTE 2: New rendering up. May be ore accurate. Grain of salt, and all that.]. It's called the Zonda R. It's a non-street-legal club racer powered by some manner of 750-hp Mercedes V12. It's Pagani's track-day version of the Ferrari Enzo Fxx and Maserati MC12. Compared to its street legal, $700,000 Zonda sibling, the R model is longer, lighter and lower, and has a longer wheelbase for the kind of stability only a slingshot dragster can provide. Only we're betting it can take corners too. More to come. – Mike Spinelli

V rldsexklusivt f r sportbilen: Zonda R! [Sportbilen.se]

Related:
Pagani Zonda Bests Ferrari, Maserati on TopGear Track [internal]