Italian hypercar company Pagani has unveiled its third hypercar the Pagani Utopia a V12-powered work of art..
The car a replacment for the much loved Huayra was unveiled at the Teatro Lirico theatre in Milan, Italy. The car's name means 'Perfect Place', and was the result of a development program running for six years including the creation of eight full-scale prototype.
Radiating simplicity, Utopia asserts itself straightaway, affirms and imposes its lines, which are so typical of Pagani but at the same time it is so different from anything they have created before. It's shape is more flowing and curvaceous from the windscreen, with its rounded upper edges, to the details of its wings and bonnet, its softer contours give it a new expression, a new outline.
A shape smoothed and refined over a long time, but which sticks in your memory from the first time you see it. The most difficult part of the process for Pagani has been to follow as closely as possible the original intention of creating a timeless design object, instead of one that follows the fashion of the period.
Compared to previous the Zonda and Huayra he new car has very few aerodynamic add-ons yet is more efficient than ever. Where some hypercars have a multitude of spoilers, Utopia incorporates the function of these appendices into its overall shape, achieving greater downforce and reduced drag solely by means of its design.
As with all Pagani car's the design is more a work of art than motor vehicle, but opening the door changes everything; a work of art, yes, but one you can sit in. The interior of Utopia is even more original, if that is possible, than its exterior shape. Neither modern nor retro, it is timeless. There are no screens apart from the minimal display in front of the driver; big screens would have been easier to fit and would have saved a lot of effort in the design, but it would have taken away much of the beauty. All the instruments are purely analog and each of the easy-to-read dials subtly reveals part of its mechanism as if it were revealing the skeleton movement.
For Pagani, every component needed for the car to function is an opportunity to be creative. Even the steering wheel has been reinvented: it is fashioned from a solid aluminum block, from the spokes and hollow rim to the steering column boss, which contains the airbag. The pedals are also made from a single block of metal, while the gear lever mechanism is still exposed but more sophisticated than ever. All this with proper obsession paid to ergonomics, efficiency and ease of access
Under the bonnett, the Pagani V12 engine is a 6-liter biturbo specially built by Mercedes-AMG for Pagani. It delivers 864 bhp and, above all, a prodigious 1100 Nm of torque spread from 2800 to 5900rpm. It revs higher and is both more flexible and more powerful while meeting the most stringent emissions regulations, including those in force in California.
For the transmission the choice was a philosophical one. It would not be a dual-clutch transmission which is efficient, but heavy and robs the driver of the ability to set the pace of the car’s acceleration.
Instead, Pagani turned to the most prestigious motorsport and high performance automotive transmission manufacturer, Xtrac, to develop the quickest shifting gearbox with helical gears possible. It is compact, light and transversely mounted for an optimized center of gravity. Moreover, in order to best match the wishes expressed by Pagani enthusiasts, its aficionados, a virtual manual would not be acceptable so a real seven-speed manual transmission has been developed. It was not an easy task to design such a gearbox with synchronizer rings and a mechanism able to handle 1100 Nm of torque adequate for a pure manual application, but it was an essential requirement for Utopia. However intelligent automatic transmissions may have become, nothing can replace the driver’s own mastery of the gearchanges: the prevailing logic is his alone, each change up
With a production run of just 99 cars as yet there has been no information released on price or performance.
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