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Sketching on a paper napkin, Jaguar Special Vehicle Operations engineers initially focused Project 8 as a 600-horsepower track day missile, a razor-edged car only nominally road-legal. Project 8 debuted at Laguna Seca during Monterey Car Week in 2017, a classic marketing effort to stir up the order bank for the maximum 300 Project 8s to be built. As proof of concept, a pre-production Project 8 set a lap record for 4-door sedans at the Nürburgring, eclipsing by 11 seconds the time previously established by an Alfa Giulia Quadrifoglio. One morning drive over a mountain road will confirm how Project 8 accomplished that feat: with the greatest of ease, it’s shockingly fast.

Nearly two years later, U.S.-spec production cars are arriving. Joyously crazy, smoothly coherent, and incredibly fast, Project 8 is an iconoclastic road-going super-sedan graced with a slightly broader capability than when originally conceived on that napkin. Project 8’s extremist two-seat Track Pack with full roll cage, racing buckets, and no rear seats won’t pass muster with federal safety regulations and thus this Jaguar will be sold in the U.S. and Canada as a leather-trimmed and elegant track missile masquerading as a mere sports sedan.

Jaguar Project 8 proves a thesis forwarded more than 20 years ago that computing power from U.S. aerospace transferred to the auto industry could unleash a generation of “Michelangelo Engineers” able to produce highly individualistic ultra-low-volume vehicles at reasonable cost so long as fundamentals like engine, gearbox and electronic architecture were available as a starting point. Project 8 has about 75 percent unique or highly modified components compared to the standard Jaguar XE. Because the standard XE was not engineered to include a super-sedan version, Project 8 was not created with the modular snap-together system Porsche has perfected with its Motorsport division’s GT2, GT3 and RS cars, allowing them to crank out one “special edition” 911 after another, all using a tasty mix of component subsets.

Project 8 is one of the most engaging road machines I’ve driven in years, with capabilities to delight any skilled driver, and a couple of minor eccentricities that demand limited compromise from its master. Project 8 owners will take no end of pleasure dogging exotic supercars on mountain roads, and throwing down the gauntlet in late-night freeway drag races, laughing all the way.

Start with the 5-liter supercharged V8, which delivers 592 horsepower and an even more impressive 516 lb. ft. of torque. The Jaguar and Range Rover supercharged V8 is not raucous and unrefined like a Detroit supercharged V8, nor raw and unharmonious like Nissan GT-R’s nonetheless potent twin-turbo V6. It has a sound and sensation that sets it apart from German twin-turbo V8s, too, delivering power in a classical V8 style. The engine, transmission and all-wheel drive system are essentially an evolution of the powertrain system of the F-type SVR.

Project 8 has a conventional ZF 8-speed, a transmission found in many European cars. It can shift up or down in 200 milliseconds, achieving rough parity with German dual-clutch gearboxes. Better still, this gearbox is smooth, quiet, and refined even when delivering loads of torque, unlike the NISMO GT-R’s dual-clutch transaxle, which has the orchestral appeal of a cement mixer filled with rocks. Project 8’s transmission is Jaguar at its finest: silky, quiet, free of harsh resonance and unpleasant harmonics.

A center differential off the side of the transmission shoots up to 50 percent of power forward when scrabbling hard through a mountain hairpin. When Jaguar first announced an F-type with all-wheel drive, I thought they would ruin the car, making it an Audi. A pointless concern, as Project 8 has none of the drivetrain harmonics and noise of the Nissan GT-R. On a mountain road, one must only gently squeeze a hand or perhaps slightly curl a wrist at the 10-and-2 position on the chunky wheel to glide through bends—delightful, beautiful, nicely weighted steering.

Project 8 brings the benefits of upright sedan architecture, with excellent outward vision and a comfortable seating position. This is a supercar that big guys will enjoy immensely thanks to ample front leg room, very good headroom, and a steering column that adjusts in a wide enough range to get anyone comfortable. It also has excellent sightlines that make it easy to place in corners.

Thanks to breakthroughs in turbo technology, we all yawn about engines with a mere 400 horsepower. In rhythm on a mountain road, Project 8 sets a pace that is wildly fast, reminding that it’s best to respect your workplace. Project 8 is dressed for duty on the road, but it is a track athlete in its core DNA. On the road, its acceleration is stunning and visceral such that on a lonely two-lane I found myself moving at track speeds and borrowed a line from that Swiss chase scene in the James Bond movie Goldfinger: “Discipline, 007, discipline.”

On a weekend trip to the wine country with a pleasant companion, Project 8 will prove docile enough in Comfort calibration, its leather-trimmed rear seat a perfect warehouse for a collection of bottles.

Production cars will arrive with the expected range of calibrations: Track, Dynamic, and Comfort. Plus, an Individual setting that is mandatory for supercars in my native Los Angeles, where setting the suspension to Comfort and drivetrain to Dynamic or Track offers the best highway compromise. The system will adjust steering response.

Which leads to one of the two areas where the owner must compromise. One can soften up the damping, but the springs are still biased toward life on-track. The Comfort setting works well, except over horrendous bad patches that have become an unpleasant component of the Southern California freeway system. Except the occasional jounce from the rear springing. In two 80-mile mountain runs, the springs were never an issue.

Lack of a front-end lift to help clear steep driveways is the more significant required work-around to save that carbon-fiber splitter. I exited and entered through the north end of my drive where the concrete pan is gently sloped. If your drive entrance is truly horrible, well, spend $3-4,000 to have it re-contoured and pour concrete at a more cooperative degree. I did. Jaguar SVO should very quickly work up a mold for a chin formed in flexible material, a surprisingly easy task thanks to that aforementioned computing power. Offer that and Project 8 becomes an everyday super-sedan.

Project 8 attracts attention from those who understand. I was chased by BMW M3s, various AMG sedans, and supercars like a McLaren and NSX. An M3 owner was given several demonstration runs, each time the driver catching up to sniff Project 8’s cooling Titanium afterburners and salute its supremacy. Project 8 also pulls admiration from guys on hyperbikes, a sub-culture that serves as a worthy measuring stick of street cred. Several bikers chased me to a photo stop, where they paused to admire the bulging rear haunches and ask questions about power and the carbon-fiber bits.

Nothing else on earth is quite like Project 8, its closest comparator in price, configuration, and performance being the $175,000 Nissan NISMO GT-R. It also bears comparison with the BMW M5 and Mercedes-AMG E63, and the winged track toy of Stuttgart, the Porsche GT3 RS.

SVO is also Jaguar Land Rover’s custom shop, and Project 8 can be ordered in one of 10,000 paint colors. Build it to taste for a car truly like no other.

Project 8 is for that person who does not want the Fast and Furious imagery of the Nissan GT-R, or the obviousness of the German alternatives. At any gathering of car enthusiasts, Project 8 will stand out and attract attention. If I had to guess, SVO will deliver the full 300 examples to market over the course of 18 to 24 months, which will make this car an exceptionally rare creature of the jungle.

McLaren’s ballistic 720S is the English firm’s latest and thus far most cohesive supercar. Several riotous days at the helm of the first 720S to land in McLaren’s west coast PR/marketing fleet convinced me that this 710-horsepower missile delivers an experience unique in the market. With each rapid evolution, McLaren draws closer to parity with Ferrari and Porsche.

Over dinner some months ago, an employee of a rival carmaker criticized McLaren for its emphasis on measurables, on quantifiable performance—numbers presented on its consumer website, and not much else. He argued that McLaren management does not understand the joie de vivre required for a supercar to transcend mere visceral stimulation. It’s not how fast you go, but how you go fast.

Then again, McLaren and by extension its owners are not burdened with the negative connotations that have pocked all sports car brands during off-decades. The Bruce McLaren heritage is a secret, unknown to most car enthusiasts even though Bruce won his first Grand Prix in 1959, age 22. Bruce McLaren was a brilliant driver who designed and built his own cars. McLarens won the Indy 500 three times. McLaren’s monster big-block V8 sports cars dominated the Can-Am in the 1960s. Adding complication to the mythology, Bruce is the racing world’s equivalent of James Dean, dying young, all that unfulfilled potential. If he had lived past 32, Bruce most likely would have rivaled Enzo Ferrari and the Porsche family for greatness. The McLaren brand is a clean slate, with a richly textured storyline to develop.

720S does not have that last degree of enveloping erotic refinement one finds in a Ferrari with a shrieking flat-plane-crank V8, nor does it have that milled billet sensibility of a Porsche. But in virtually every measure, 720S is quicker than a Ferrari 488, and matches the sprinting ability of Porsche 911 Turbos. Ferrari’s product advantages winnow down to just how well Ferrari meshes the controls and seating position, the driving environment, with exterior dimension, that totality of experience, that joie de vivre. Yet with that gap closing, Ferrari’s biggest advantage is brand recognition that surpasses even Apple. Perhaps McLaren should lobby for a full display of McLaren race cars at Pebble Beach next year, and help close the gap.

720S unabashedly forwards the brand-defining creed of the ruthless racer: I will beat you, by half seconds and tenths till I am a minute ahead. Not as artful or alluring as the Ferrari essence, but 720S has a vicious soul that offers no quarter, no pity, no mercy—an efficient assassin. Damn, that appeals to my heart. McLaren should not gift new owners with a predictable bauble shaped like a 720S, delivered in a velvet-lined box, to collect dust on a bookshelf. Instead, they should send a gleaming forged dagger, corporate symbol embossed on the hilt, the grip tightly wrapped with gummy, high-tech McLaren racing orange fabric. Ruthless speed assassin is a solid brand message for now, as the Bruce McLaren legacy unfolds over the years.

McLaren has never possessed the financials to completely reinvent, to throw out the results of its origin of species, the MP4/12C, which was sent before its time into this breathing world, scarce half made up such that dogs barked at it. Instead, McLaren has spent more than six years honing the exemplary fundamentals of that car, the pieces they got right from the beginning. The carbon-fiber tub with massive alloy girders is a gorgeous sculpture, and in 720S incorporates lower side sills that allow a proper lady to enter the car, dignity intact. It’s also a big reason why 720S is surprisingly light, at 2828 lbs.

The twin-turbo V8 traces heritage to an Indycar engine that was never produced, but now spectacularly whooshes up 710 horsepower and what feels like fathomless torque whenever making a full-throttle run to 125 mph or more. In 720S the reinvented engine is more compact, sitting lower in the car, a difference one senses. That lower height is obvious too when backing up: there’s a clear view behind the car through the surprisingly airy canopy.

The Hand of God airbrake first seen on the greatest supercar of all time, the 1995 McLaren F1, moves the center of mass backwards in the car under hard braking, 720S squatting down stable as can be from higher triple digits. It’s also drama when that big tail flaps upwards. 720S retains the much criticized yet quite brilliant “accumulator” suspension system that adjusts 720S for track finesse or a plush ride for hedonistic weekends in Santa Barbara or Carmel. And of course, that secret weapon of the English, amazingly subtle steering, equal to any on earth. Suspension and steering are fused with the driver’s mind, so 720S glides through corners in mag-lev fashion, hovering a few inches above the pavement. Here is your joie de vivre.

Ruthless English racer thinking has been applied to understanding the buyers, too, McLaren unceremoniously throwing out the most extreme and mostly wrongheaded elements of its early racer-boy thinking. 720S body panels are a mix of composite and aluminium, not that nasty SMC “aerodynamic sheath” of the original cars. 720S has a boldly sculpted shape, with a teardrop canopy pushed far forward. How that teardrop forms and rises out of the broad rear fenders is truly erotic—joie de vivre. Like a Ferrari, the dash is low, so the road rushes at you between two blunt fendercrests, just beyond your toes. Ferrari still does this better than any, but McLaren has its own interpretation.

In details, one sees the ruthless engineering of the wind tunnel, McLaren following its own more cunning version of Bugatti’s motto: form follows performance. The headlights are not mere eyeballs. Look beyond that LED blade to find air inlets feeding radiators, the air sucked out the side (detailers will need razor-thin tweezers to pluck out tiny bits of gravel the airflow jams into bodywork seams). Note the “barge boards” built into doors to funnel air into the primary radiators placed on the rear flanks, and how McLaren has taught the air to adhere to body surfaces. McLaren needs a consumer sales video shot in the wind tunnel with colored smoke to illustrate all the aero tricks. Owners should invest an hour tracing the channels and finding radiators and extraction points to appreciate the aerodynamics.

McLaren’s V8 is not lag-free like current Ferraris and Porsches, but once that half-second whoosh fills the cabin at about 3000 rpm and the engine is on the boil, power delivery is linear, unstoppable. It has no high-pitched scream like a Ferrari, but 720’s rock opera baritone bellow hearkens to McLaren’s Can-Am heritage. 720S doesn’t sound, feel, smell or behave like any other supercar. Some supercars only come to life in that last 20 percent of ability that’s so foolish to access on the road. Exploiting 720S fully requires a race track, too, but it will thrill and excite anytime, anywhere, under almost any condition.

McLaren human factors are still not equal to Ferrari. My car had high-sided, minimally padded track seats, so claimed packaging improvements were hard to assess. McLaren’s racer esthetic also means a simpler interior, not the Germanic Starship helm of a Porsche. My 720S had none of the leather that impressed adequately in a 570GT a friend of mine and I shot across Wales a year ago. Meld fine leather, carpet and adjustable seats into 720S and there’s little to criticize about the interior. More adjustment to the steering wheel would help, too, but when hustling it all works very, very well.

To stave off the ravages of depreciation, McLaren must continue offering excellent lease programs, with rewards for those who re-up in a year or two. McLaren offers a track day warranty, which applies within certain parameters. McLaren aura will benefit from another P1-style hypercar based on the 720S, with or without a design that places the driver in vehicle center, passengers to each side. If the French at the Automobile Club de l’Ouest can harmonize their rules with the rest of the sports car world, McLaren should return to Le Mans, a deposit in the brand equity account.

Most heartening to men my age, who worry younger men and boys no longer yearn to possess great cars, the 720S passed the hardest test for any sports car. The pre-teen boys stood on the benches to watch the car make its way through the school pick-up line. Such lads in the neighborhood would lay in wait each day to see me swing up the butterfly door, stand into the car, and fire up that nasty V8, watching me ease her back the long drive to our narrow lane. If a car captures the spirit and dreams of young boys eager to become red-blooded men, then something is going right.
 

Yesterday I went up in Breitling’s 1940 Douglas DC-3. To execute a photo-op flyby with the Hollywood sign in the background, we flew directly south from Van Nuys Airport to pass over the plane’s birthplace, Santa Monica Airport. This fall when the elegant DC-3 reaches home in Geneva it will be the oldest plane to ever circumnavigate the globe.

Starting in Switzerland this past March not far from Breitling’s shop, the 77-year-old twin-engine plane flew along the Balkan peninsula to Greece then on to Tel Aviv, Amman and the Emirates. Francisco Agullo, primary pilot, owner of the DC-3, and Breitling’s partner in the preservation of significant aircraft, next flew to Karachi, then India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, China and Japan before crossing to Alaska, landing on Shemya, a five sq. mi island in the Aleutian chain about 1200 miles south of Anchorage.

Agullo has earned his keep flying commercial passenger jets for Swissair and developing pilot training programs, but his real passion is elemental forms of flight, seeking just the sort of adventures the pioneers of aviation pursued nearly 100 years ago. He spent many years as a bush pilot in Canada, then flew in Africa for the United Nations.

Agullo has completed nine round-the-world flights, including one in 2010 in an Ultralight, which isn’t much more than a hang-glider with a lawnmower engine and a chair. Agullo and Breitling successfully partnered to preserve a four-engine Lockheed Super Constellation, but for the DC-3 Agullo and his band of aviation enthusiasts had far greater ambitions.

To help defray costs of this round-the-world expedition of the skies, Agullo and Breitling agreed to stash a 500-piece limited edition of its brand-defining Navitimer chronograph deep in the plane’s belly, gaining retail value with every leg of the journey.

Like many of us in the car world who enjoy the computer-driven perfection of contemporary high-performance cars but yearn for intimate connection to the mechanical workings and physics of a vintage car no matter how much slower it might be, Agullo and his crew of pilots clearly revel in the DC-3.

Look the plane over and you’ll see jointed arms and all manner of finely honed pieces under the alloy skin, all manipulated with levers and knobs in the tiny cockpit. Agullo has added sensible elements like GPS navigation and enough of the latest tech to fly in bad weather—the plane took off from Oakland yesterday morning in heavy fog without trouble. But this DC-3 remains the pure and simple plane that defined reliable air travel in the age of Indiana Jones, and that Supreme Allied Commander and U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower credited as one of the four most important tools of victory in World War Two.

Agullo has accumulated enough stories for a book patterned after one of my favorites, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Wind, Sand and Stars,” which made me fall in love with the idea that life is a series of adventures large and small. Before our short flight, Agullo described the challenges of taking off and landing in 130F temperatures in the Sub-Continent, and being forced to fly over India at more than 13,000 feet, a few thousand feet beyond where humans can easily draw enough oxygen. He also provided a simple metric: one hour of flight requires 100 man-hours of maintenance and preparation.

To gain adequate range for the crossing from Asia to the Aleutians, a bladder-like fuel tank was strapped into the center of the passenger cabin, but on this open-ocean flight along the coast of Kamchatka the wings began icing, forcing Agullo to fly for many hours at altitudes of 1500 feet, and as low as 500 feet.

Agullo’s quiet description of the flight echoes Exupéry’s tale of flying a mail plane from Chile to Argentina, Andean winds pressing Exupéry’s tiny craft downward and out to sea. The main differences are Agullo’s manifest skill as a pilot and modest demeanor, whereas Exupéry spooled poetic language and was by all accounts a merely adequate pilot whose great children’s book, “The Little Prince,” resulted from his experiences after crashing in the desert of French North Africa.

Passion for Breitlings and the company’s special place in the history of aviation produced drama along the way. Agullo and one other pilot have non-numbered pilot’s editions of the DC-3 circumnavigation Navitimer. In the Emirates, a Sheik who collects Breitling watches was willing to trade what was no doubt a $100,000+ hefty gold Breitling for the circumnavigation Navitimer on Agullo’s wrist. The limited edition is sold out, their owners no doubt anxious for the safe return of Agullo and his beautiful plane at the Sion Airshow.

Though we enjoyed a subtle whiff of fuel in the warm, stuffy cabin during flight and I chuckled at the sight out my window of a tiny trail of lubricant weeping over the engine’s alloy shrouding, reminding me of period-correct luxury and sports cars of the 1940s and ‘50s that I have owned, this “Band of Brothers” plane flew confidently. Our landing was smoother than any in a modern commercial aircraft, thanks to Francisco Agullo’s subtle hand. Of all the exciting moments and wild adventures of my life, this is among the most memorable.

Like all the stories on this blog, this was written several years ago.

“My father Horacio said, ‘If you want to be part of this company, you must understand the product by working in the company as a normal person, not as the son of the owner.’ Maybe not every family company is run this way, but it is very important that we keep this humble approach,” says Christopher Pagani, who at 34 has recently assumed leadership of Pagani Automobili’s global sales and marketing. His older brother Leonardo works in product engineering. Pagani is classic Latin mythology, Horacio Pagani an automotive Odysseus of the Italian Diaspora, with sons bred from birth for ascension to the throne. Horacio is the central pillar of Pagani Automobili.

The pillars of Pagani: Mercedes-AMG, mastery of carbon-fiber, Dallara as friend and aerodynamicist, rarity that leads to long-term value, Juan Manuel Fangio, carefully sorted dealer body, and the mythology of Horacio Pagani’s journey to the heartland of the Italian supercar.

Pagani Automobili is launching its third generation hypercar, the Utopia (pronounced oooo-toe-PEEE-uh, the Italian way), which builds upon proven engineering from its immediate predecessors, the Huayra R track car and Huayra BC, which have functioned within Pagani the same way Pista and Competizione models do within Ferrari, pulling forward engineering advancements. Each generation of Pagani car—Zonda, Huayra and now Utopia—has carefully evolved the architecture and the concept of what a Pagani should be, 25 years of evolutionary mutations and bold advancements.

“We tested a lot of the materials, suspension arms, and other pieces in the Huayra R that are used in Utopia. We did the same with Zonda R, which was a track car in 2010 used to develop the 2011 Huayra. Some of the parts on the Zonda R are exactly the same on Huayra,” says Christopher.

“Utopia is a car that takes the driver back to a very analog way of driving,” says Christopher. “Now we see in the market a lot of electrification, hybrids. Utopia is completely different. We continue using a V12 engine developed in partnership with Mercedes-AMG without any form of electrification or batteries or hybrid.” Pagani’s emphasis is on engagement and sensation, not just outright clinical speed. Though with 864 horsepower and a weight just over 2800 pounds, Pagani Utopia will please the Gods of Speed.

Utopia’s engine is an evolution of the V12 first seen in the Huayra Roadster (pronounced hoooWHY-ruh, named for an Incan god). “Huayra Roadster was produced in 40 units. We took that engine for Utopia and evolved it to meet all the emissions standards worldwide,” says Christopher. “At Mercedes-AMG, we have 60 to 70 people working on Pagani projects. The engine is fully developed by AMG, but all the specifics of the engine are defined by us,” says Christopher.

“After 20 years of work, AMG gave us permission to call the engine Pagani V12, the first time AMG and Mercedes-Benz have done this for a company not owned by Mercedes-Benz,” says Christopher. “The engine in the Zonda [named for the winds of the Andes] was an existing powertrain used in other AMG and Mercedes cars. It was upgraded from 6 liters to 7.3 liters for Zonda. But starting with Huayra, our second-generation car, the AMG engine was dedicated to Pagani,” says Christopher.

“Mercedes-AMG can provide an engine that is fully compliant with emissions, even in California. Mercedes trusted my father with the first engine in the 1990s. We are very proud of this partnership,” says Christopher. Mercedes-AMG confers credibility and excellence that Pagani could not achieve on its own without decades of world championships, Le Mans victories and millions of miles logged on tens of thousands of production cars. This collaboration brings parity with other supercar makers and is the second mighty pillar of Pagani mythology.

“We do not go for crazy amounts of horsepower. We have 864,” says Christopher, sincerely and without the least hint of wry humor, and perhaps justifiably because battery-electric hypercars like the Rimac Nevera have over 1900 electric horsepower, and the Ferrari SF90 Stradale’s hybrid gas-electric 4-wheel drive powertrain has just short of 1000 horsepower, though Stradale also weighs about 600 pounds more.

“We have very light weight—less than 1300 kilos.” Utopia weighs 2822 pounds, roughly equivalent to the McLaren 765 Longtail (2952 lbs. topped off with fluids). Depending on driver and passenger, and the amount of fuel on board, each horsepower is pulling little more than 3.25 pounds. In current German fashion, there’s virtually no turbo lag, delivering a mountain of torque from very low revs, in this case 811 lb.-ft. between 2800 and 5900 rpm, plenty enough to light your hair on fire thrusting into triple-digits. All of it accomplished with singing pistons, and no electric motors attached to the gearbox or sitting in the nose powering the front wheels and adding weight.

Utopia is in some regards a 1980s purist rear-drive supercar built with the finest German and Italian technology of 2022. The Porsche 959 and then the Acura NSX sent supercars down a highly technological path in the 1980s and early ‘90s. In some regards, Pagani represents the path not taken, and that helps it stand apart from others on that Big Supercar X/Y Graph.  No other supercar is quite like it.

This analog sentiment is reinforced by Utopia’s optional manual gearbox, something not offered on Huayra and very much demanded by returning customers. “We started working with Xtrac with the Zonda R in 2010—we needed a racing gearbox and clutch to manage the insane amount of torque. It is a transverse gearbox to keep the weight near the center of the car,” says Christopher.

Xtrac is best known for sequential-shift gearboxes in rally cars, but now supplies gearboxes to Pagani and others, including Czinger, the hybrid hypercar maker that is in many ways a California techie parallel to Pagani, both brands passionate extensions of a somewhat secretive and highly advanced tier one supplier company, and run by father-son teams.

“We use a single clutch. A dual-clutch gearbox is much faster shifting but weighs 200 kilos [as we find in most Porsches], and our Xtrac is less than 100 kilos. A big difference in the dynamics of the car. Our cars are meant to run on the street, not a 24-hour race. So, the difference of a millisecond in a shift is not so important,” says Christopher. Paganis seek involvement, working with the car, not just slick, anodyne performance. To state the obvious, Paganis are designed for short, intensely visceral driving experiences, those stolen moments of bliss that blow out mental clutter of other pursuits. No surprise that the manual has a tightly gated shifter like Ferraris of the past.

“My father started working with composite materials over 35 years ago when he was at Lamborghini,” says Christopher. At that time, Lamborghini did not take Horacio’s offer to create an in-house carbon-fiber capability. “Then he started his own company, supplying carbon-fiber for most of the companies here in the Motor Valley,” says Christopher. And so a stable revenue stream was born.

“All carbon-fiber in our cars is formed in Pagani materials. Every fiber, every resin, every compound was developed by us.” Pagani is unwilling to detail much about the carbon-fiber business or its significant list of clients in Italy’s Motor Valley and around the world. Pagani’s absolute mastery of carbon-fiber is another measure of the engineering integrity and value of the Pagani name. The sheer audacity of leaving Lamborghini to start a carbon-fiber business is another significant pillar of the mythology.

“Utopia is a car that looks very simple on the outside, but the amount of work on the wind tunnel and in CFD [computational fluid dynamics, meaning digital virtual wind tunnel testing] is considerable,” says Christopher. Another pillar of the brand is Horacio Pagani’s longstanding friendship and collaboration with Dallara.

“My father met Gian Paolo Dallara when he came to Italy from Argentina,” says Christopher. Dallara manufactures Indycars, Formula E chassis, Le Mans sports-racing prototypes, and aids the Haas Formula One team. Dallara was fully partnered with Ferrari in developing the 1994-95 Ferrari 333SP sports-racing car, and they helped Audi with its first great Le Mans racer, the R8. Significant to this story, Dallara’s skill in ultra-high-speed aerodynamics brought them into collaboration with Bugatti on elements of the Chiron.

Dallara has defined Pagani aerodynamics in its wind tunnel in Parma. In Italian fashion much of the channeling is hidden, allowing the clean, simple almost vintage body forms. It is the exact opposite of McLaren, which pulls all the aerodynamics to the surface to define the body design.

Pagani will never be a legend in motorsport like Ferrari, Porsche, or McLaren. They will never even have the distant and mostly disconnected motorsport greatness of Bugatti or Lotus. Pagani mythology is built around the father’s journey from obscurity to greatness, an Argentinian Odysseus striving to reach the center of the Italian sports car world.

“My father, Horacio, worked in my grandfather’s bakery shop, but was always passionate about cars,” says Christopher. Horacio’s hometown, Casilda to north and west of Buenos Aires, was as far removed from the centers of the automotive industry as the far side of the moon, but he tinkered with motorized bikes and buggies as a child. “He started at the university to study industrial design, but Argentina was not the best place to study this subject and he never completed.”

“He built a formula car with Renault engine that impressed. He met the best racing engineer in Argentina, Oreste Berta, who introduced my father to Juan Manuel Fangio.” Fangio was world driving champion five times in the 1950s and arguably the greatest racing driver of all time, along with Tazio Nuvolari and perhaps Mario Andretti. You can find an incredible documentary about Fangio on Netflix. Fangio is yet another pillar of the Pagani mythology.

“Fangio wrote letters of commendation for my father to speak with Enzo Ferrari and Lamborghini’s Giulio Alfieri.” Fangio won the world championship in 1956 in a Ferrari based on the Lancia D50, and in 1957 in the Maserati 250F, which Alfieri helped develop and that many consider the most beautiful Grand Prix car of all time. In the 1970s and ‘80s Alfieri developed V8 and V12 engines at Lamborghini.

“Alfieri hired my father. He started as the last of the least, working on body parts. He was there for nearly nine years.” Horacio Pagani contributed to the design of the Lamborghini Countach 25th anniversary models. But when Lamborghini chose not to develop an in-house carbon-fiber program, Horacio left, founding his own carbon-fiber manufacturing firm.

Another pillar is the Pagani family’s embodiment of the innate Latin ability to build and maintain. Just as I cherish my Berettas because the family has owned the company for hundreds of years, the younger Paganis intend to grow and sustain the company their father’s genius has brought to life. One reason why in parallel they are at least exploring battery-electric propulsion of future cars.

“My brother Leonardo is 35, named of course for Leonardo Da Vinci. He is a car designer. He oversees investment to create new products. He looks at increased production, or to create new areas of the company. He is part of the special projects operation which are all the one-off models. He also works with a few other team members on development of the full electric car,” says Christopher.

“Over the past ten years my father was able to build a very strong management team. We will see if they accept us as the new bosses. It’s still too early to say who will be in charge one day. My father is still very involved. He has just turned 67 this month.” Another pillar, the hard men, the professional managers that Horacio has assembled to ensure solid MBA efficiency as the company grows.

“We want to be involved, to take this company to the next level, and at the least make sure that what has been created remains, but it is a matter of timing. If I will be the new CEO or my brother.” There is always tension between founding families and professional managers. Fortunately, the brothers have complimentary skill sets.

Another pillar is a sensible approach to growing the business and caring for a select client base. “We are very cautious about caring for the cars. At first, we only sold near to the factory, in Italy. Then the UK, France, Monaco. When the company was financially strong enough to open the U.S. market, we developed six dealerships that can provide service to the client at the same level we can give here at San Cesario.”

Pagani follows the same client heat map of any high-end car brand, with dealers in Greenwich, Miami, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, and Dallas. “When a client comes to us, they usually already have a very nice garage with Italian cars and other brands,” says Christopher, which means the owners are already schooled in the special nature of owning a rare supercar. “It’s kind of a celebration buying a Pagani. The cost is really high so it’s a big decision for the client, too.” Pagani has “flying doctors” who can help if a car is stored for a period in a remote location. But the dealers assume the burden of “ownership” of the cars they sell, serving the clients.

With fewer than 500 examples built over the past 25 years and currently a maximum capacity of 50 vehicles per year, Paganis are known only to a happy few, though they stir the imagination of automotive fanboys who play video games. Yet it’s important to reemphasize the cars are anything but video game cars. Pagani in some ways represents the path not taken in the 1980s and ‘90s, the age of the “young timer” supercars like the Porsche 959 and Acura NSX, which defined a technological path for supercars. Paganis have Bosch electronics, but they retain the elegance of vintage sports cars, and the analog feel of the best Italian cars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It’s not surprising that a majority of clients are opting for the Xtrac manual gearbox, which has a gated shifter like Ferraris had into the early 1990s.

And then there’s rarity. “When you look at Pagani car values at auctions, you see that the cars have not gone down in value. Pricing on used cars has gone to crazy values. We do not control the market. The cars trade in auctions or private sales. Cars that were sold in 2005 or ‘06 that were probably $500,000 are now in the 5 million range. This is insane appreciation. And we are not talking about vintage sports cars. We are talking about recent supercars, with less than 20 years of history.”

Pagani may never have the 70-year+ competition pedigree of Ferrari or Porsche, world championships and Le Mans victories to its credit. Look at the struggles McLaren has had over the past decade translating and embuing their Grand Prix excellence into heritage for the road cars. But Pagani has hard-earned mythology of its own, from grandfather’s bakery shop in a small town in the shadows of the Andes to the endorsement of 5-time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio to the art and science of carbon-fiber to Mercedes-AMG and now glorious cars that embody the very nature of the Italian supercar genre and the Italian approach to private family business.

“When we decided to build Concours Club, we brought our real estate developer’s skillset and our racing mindset,” says Neil Gehani, Chairman of Trilogy Real Estate Group and the force behind Concours Club, a new state-of-the-art automotive country club built between runways of Miami-Opa Locka Airport in the heart of urban Miami.

“A number of people have tried to crack the code in Miami,” says Gehani, who is currently leading the points for the Ferrari Challenge race series, and preparing for the Finale Mondiali this month at the Mugello circuit in Tuscany. “I was told it cannot be done—there’s no land, zoning is difficult.”

“We are seven miles north of Miami International, 15 minutes south of Ft. Lauderdale, 14 miles from Miami Beach,” says Gehani. “Miami-Opa Locka has three FBOs [fixed base operators]. Atlantic just bought a Ryan JetCenter built for $98 million. Hotel Fontainebleau is there, built by the Soffer family,” says Gehani. “We got it zoned for a high-end auto country club with a 60-year lease.” 

”Miami has often been where the biggest ambitions come to die,” Gehani says. “We don’t want to be another of those deals that was advertised and never happened. We did not market until we were almost 70 percent done with first-phase construction [of the track].” In that first round, 40 founding memberships sold out, raising $14 million.

Among those founding members is 3-time Indy 500 winner and longtime Miami resident Hélio Castroneves. “When Neil came to me with the idea of a race track in between Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, I thought ‘This is going to be a great opportunity.’ I don’t have a workshop or someplace to go when I finally hang up my racing shoes. I can drive here,” says Castroneves with a laugh. When asked how he felt about serving as the digital measuring stick for lap times and method through every single corner, Castroneves chuckles again and says, “Well, you have friends who talk trash and I can say ‘Well, all right. Let’s prove it.’” Castroneves also provided input on track configuration.

With the 2-mile track completed and the clubhouse and related command-control buildings in final stages, a second round of marketing will offer 100 “Elite” memberships by year’s end.

“Everyone else looked at the outskirts,” says Gehani, who turned that thought process inside-out. “We can rely on local hotels, local food and beverage suppliers, professionals and service industry that live minutes away from the project. If you’re 90 miles away from a city, you just can’t find people who have those skillsets.”

Gehani, whose first sports car was a Porsche 911 purchased in his late twenties with profits from a real estate project, is lifting a page from Porsche’s own real estate development playbook: don’t force people to travel to a remote racetrack built in a cow pasture or bean field; instead, bring a racetrack to a densely populated area. Porsche’s two North American Experience Centers are in densely populated urban areas built on reclaimed post-industrial land, near major international airports and have significant highway traffic flow just minutes away.

Concours Club incorporates “the sum of all wisdom for a road course,” says Aaron Weiss, President of Concours Club. Weiss is one of Gehani’s most important hires. His CV includes stints as President and COO of Moroso Motorsports Park in Florida, and also Executive V.P. of New York’s premiere private racing club, Monticello Motor Club. When the economy turned ugly in 2009, Weiss founded Sim-Sport.Net and in partnership with Speedsource manufactured high-end realistic simulator controls.

“We looked at all the current equipment through the lens of a private club with students looking to improve their skills,” says Weiss, who engaged the finest suppliers in North America and Europe to design and build not only the physical track itself, but just as importantly the electronics and command-control systems that are integral to contemporary racing.

“I’ve been on a quest to eliminate right-seat coaching. It’s a risk to the guy in the right seat, and a 175-pound instructor makes a huge difference in the car’s handling,” says Weiss. He hired GPX Labs, the simulator company of long-time racer Jeff Segal, to adapt their GPX Stream software system, which has been used in Ferrari Challenge for the past two seasons. GPX Stream takes real-time data from a car and delivers it instantaneously to a trackside coach.

“There’s a camera in the car, and equipment that integrates data coming from the CAN bus [the car’s electronic systems]. You can see in one quick image steering input, brake pedal pressure, throttle position. GPX Stream feeds that to any screen in our network. All of our fleet cars will be outfitted, and members’ cars if they want it. Your coach is on pitwall, in one of our buildings, almost anywhere in the world, and they can communicate in your ear just like in normal driver-to-pit communications,” says Weiss. In other words, a talented coach is analyzing your method and feeding input to your earpiece, rather than shouting and gesticulating from the passenger seat. “Now the historical data we have been analyzing for years and using in simulators becomes real-time. The instructor can say ‘You turned in late for this corner last lap so get down to the marks…try earlier, try later.’”

Gehani brought Castroneves in as a founding member, not only for cachet and marketing power in Miami and the greater racing community, but also to feed the data base, to serve as one hell of a measuring stick and learning tool. “If you’ve driven a fleet car and want to compare with Hélio, your lap data can be overlaid,” says Weiss. “If you want to see what Hélio does in any corner or complex on the circuit, I can send that stream right to any iPad, laptop, or screen in the facility.” Coaches can superimpose video of a member’s path through a corner over that of Hélio, showing the differences in approach, arc, exit. “I can show you where you turned in, where Hélio turned in. Analysis is fairly exact.”

And then there is control of flow on the course. “I have a control room. We can capture data, move data around, and control the entire race course,” says Weiss. “We are working with Racetrack Engineering, which runs the cameras and replays for Indianapolis, and also the Formula One U.S. Grand Prix at COTA [Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas]. The track is saturated with PTZ cameras [Pan-Tilt-Zoom] and electronic flag panels. Peppered around the track are individual server stations called Trackside Racks, or TSRs. We also have the track covered with ‘MyLaps’ timing groups. We have used these to create multiple shorter segments.” All this technology allows Concours Club to run the course without the burden of corner workers. Beyond payroll savings, that means it is very easy to set up the track for a member on-demand, when they want it, with no need to assemble a supporting cast of characters.

The technology also makes the track safer and easier to manage. “Tracks have segments, one, two, three,” says Weiss, referring to the three timed segments often shown in television coverage of Formula One races. “But what if you had a 2-mile track like ours with 20 segments? Now, each segment is a corner, or a complex of corners. If a car spins or wobbles, if it does not complete a segment in the expected amount of time, trackside lighting goes yellow. The software system will aim a camera at the zone and notify an operator to look closely for an anomaly. If the driver simply went wide and is still going, we turn the yellow off. If there is an off or an incident, yellows go up.”

And then there’s ease of use. “Paddocks accommodate members arriving at any time, without crossing the track. We have two paddocks and pitlanes. One for members, the other for events staged by manufacturers,” says Weiss. “The track runs in three 4-hour shifts. We can always ensure that members have daily access even if non-member events are scheduled for one or two of our slots.” In other words, that Lamborghini, Porsche or Ferrari event for journalists or potential owners will not interfere with playtime for members.

“We are not a strategic branded facility,” says Gehani. “We want to be Switzerland.” Several premiere brands have asked to stage events at Concours Club, “but we have politely declined for now,” says Gehani. Clearly, Gehani knows the track will prove irresistible to performance car manufacturers wanting to reach the wealthy of South Florida.

Concours Club is first and foremost a private club and learning tool for gentlemen racers. “We have a large irrigated concrete skidpad with a pitch to a center drain,” says Weiss. “The irrigation system is comparable to those used in all the BMW Performance Centers.” Gehani and Weiss looked at a kickplate, like those at the Porsche Experience Centers, but in truth these systems demonstrate stability control systems. As is so often the case, the old ways are often the best, and a wet skidpad is the best place to learn the fundamentals of car control, sliding across a safely controlled environment.

Gehani has financed the project almost entirely on his own, retaining clear majority ownership and thus control and direction. “We we are investing the capital required to build the garages and plan on offering the option of renting rather than requiring members to buy real estate. Concours Club is well capitalized and focused on delivering what we think our clients will prefer. Clients will have options to rent or buy, but we don’t have to pre-sell anything to build.”

This approach adds flexibility. A member with children and grandchildren who love racing might use the club for decades, or lose interest in five years. Renting means the member leaving the club is not left with an expensive “Garage-Majal” townhouse in a remote location, with nothing but farms or desert nearby. In such a dense urban area, reselling garage space should not prove difficult.

“In 2015 I was visiting Miami to avoid a ‘polar vortex’ in the upper Midwest,” says Gehani, who will soon leave his home in Chicago to permanently relocate to Miami. “I saw every sort of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche…all these sports cars. I was wondering ‘Why is there nothing comparable to the Autobahn country club in Joliete where I first started racing? Look at Miami’s car culture, the international culture, Formula One is coming. They have Indy car races. And at that moment I told myself ‘I’m going to build one of these clubs.’ Who ever thought we could pull this off at a private airport? But we did.”