Horacio Pagani has had a surprising life. His passion for cars, speed and design emerged very early and, at the age of 12, he amazed everyone with models of supercars carved from wood or modelled in clay.
He made his debut into the world of racing cars when he was 20, designing an F.3 that competed in Argentina under the colours of the official Renault team. Then came an enormous number of industrial design projects in which he had an accelerated apprenticeship, combining a mixture of creativity and a maniacal search for perfection.
He met Juan Manuel Fangio, his childhood hero, who became the right person to introduce him to Modena, the home of legends like Ferrari and Lamborghini. And the miracle took place at Lamborghini.
It was engineer Alfieri who provided the young Horacio with the space to express his imagination and manual dexterity.
He started off as a third level mechanic in the bodywork department but was rapidly promoted to manager of the new composite material department. He took part in all the important projects of those years: the LMA Jeep, the restyling of the Jalpa, the design of the Countach Evoluzione (the first car in the world with a one hundred per cent carbon chassis), the Golf Caddy and the 4 valve Countach.
In 1988, he set up Pagani Composite Research which carried out various projects, including the restyling of the Countach Anniversary, for which the company also supplied the final details in composite materials.
At the height of this collaboration, Pagani worked with the team that designed the Diablo, the Lamborghini P140, the L30 and the Diablo Anniversary.
The difficult economic climate created in 1992 by the events linked to the Gulf War did not discourage Pagani from producing his own supercar.
Horacio Pagani’s fondest dream – to build his own supercar – started to turn into reality in 1988 – when the draft drawings of the “C8 Project” were shown for the first time to Fangio. The car was to be named Fangio F1 after Fangio as a tribute to the great champion and showed the respect that Pagani felt for him.
In 1992, Pagani began to construct a prototype and the first model was tested in the Dallara wind tunnel in 1993. The positive results obtained marked the beginning of a long period of design and definition of the construction details.
At this point Fangio introduced Pagani to Mercedes, the company to which he was linked by his series of historic Formula 1 victories. Mercedes could foresee that the project was worthwhile and, in 1994, officially agreed to supply its powerful V12 engine.
After four more years of hard work, Pagani obtained type approval of the coupé open version of the C8 Project and the first Zonda C12 was presented in the 1999 Geneva Motor Show. Juan Manuel Fangio is no longer with us and Pagani has changed the name of his car to Zonda, the name of the wind that blows in the Andes, out of modesty and respect for the great man. The car draws its inspiration from the Mercedes Group C Silver Arrows
From its very first appearance it was made quite clear that it was not just an adventure, one of the numerous prototypes destined to remain as concept cars, but “…a dream that has been transformed into a glittering reality”.
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