While The Business Times was speaking to Horacio Pagani via Google Meet on the day of the Utopia Roadster’s launch in Singapore, something unexpected happened.
With a smile, his son Christopher, nominally the marketing director of the company (and a trusted but “overpaid” interpreter, according to the senior Pagani), picked up his iPad and aimed the camera out the window of his father’s office in Modena. Outside was a sign bearing a short but deliberate message that the Paganis wanted me to see.
The Utopia Roadster made its South-east Asian debut on Thursday (Feb 27) at ONE°15 Marina Sentosa Cove, with 60 invited guests poring over the ultra-rare hypercar, one of just 130 units that will ever be made.
Karsono Kwee’s Eurokars Supersports, the Pagani distributor for South-east Asia, expects to deliver its first Utopia Roadster in Singapore by the end of this year.
As if one unicorn wasn’t enough, a right-hand drive Utopia Coupe (one of only 99) was also on display at the Roadster’s launch. Eurokars used the occasion to officially hand it over to its new owner, a customer the company would only describe as a “local collector”.
If you somehow missed the invite, Eurokars is putting the Utopia Roadster on public display at Dempsey Hill on Mar 2, from 7 am to 11.30 am. Bring a camera but leave your chequebook at home, because every last example has been spoken for.
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That’s despite a price tag that would make even a billionaire think twice. Each Utopia starts at 3.1 million euros (S$4.3 million) before taxes. To register one for a blast down to the shops, the total bill would cross the S$20 million mark.
Still, the money would be for an art piece as much as an automobile. The Utopia is what would happen if a racing car and Michelangelo’s statue of David somehow produced a lovechild. It represents the pinnacle of Horacio Pagani’s obsession with mechanical purity, blended with his relentless pursuit of beauty and detail.
The steering wheel is one example of how Pagani rolls: each one starts as a solid 43 kg block of aluminium, before being milled down to just 1.7 kg over a painstaking 28-hour process.
Like its Coupe sibling, the Roadster is powered by a 6-litre twin-turbo V12 tailor-made for Pagani by Mercedes-AMG, producing 876 hp and 1,100 Nm of torque. The powerhouse engine meets the toughest emissions standards without any hybrid assistance, defying the industry’s trend towards electrification.
In fact, Pagani said although the firm has been working on a pure electric car based on the Utopia, few people actually want one. “There hasn’t been enough client interest to make sure that we can sustain building a full electric car,” he said.
In yet another break from industry trends, Pagani brought back a manual gearbox for the car. An automatic built by Xtrac (the gearbox specialist behind Formula 1 transmissions) is optional, but 75 per cent of Utopia buyers have opted for the three-pedal version, validating Pagani’s assertion that the Utopia is for drivers who want a raw, mechanical connection to the road.
“The Utopia is a little bit a car out of the ordinary,” he said. “It’s the car for drivers who like pure, fun, simple hypercars.”
Then again, Pagani has had a lifetime’s experience of coming up with ideas outside of conventional wisdom. During a stint at Lamborghini, he pushed for carbon fibre in supercars, only to be told it had no future.
Undeterred, he bought his own autoclave (an oven for curing the expensive but strong material) with borrowed money and eventually founded Pagani Automobili, where carbon-titanium composites are now an industry benchmark.
But, for all the work he’s done with high-tech materials, Pagani might well be thought of as an artist first. His sketches are done with pencil and paper, not digital tools. Searching for beauty is a daily ritual for him. Each morning, he takes an hour-long walk in nature, drawing inspiration from the world around him.
Some days, he’ll drive or take a train to Milan, soaking in the architecture, museums and design culture. A voracious reader, he’s currently immersed in a book on Emilio Pucci, studying the Italian designer’s use of colour.
“We cannot say that we do a perfect car because a perfect car doesn’t exist, but what we can say in Pagani is that we try always to research beauty,” he said. With that, the younger Pagani aimed the iPad’s camera at the signpost outside his father’s office window. In Italian, it read “Centre for research in art and science”. And you thought Pagani made mere hypercars.
