The Zonda’s insane farewell special may be old news, but would you just walk by if you saw one with its hood carapace torn asunder? You could not. Come and see the gallery of heat-rainbowed titanium below!
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.