Luxury Insider - The Online Luxury Magazine

There is little point saying that this mid-engined supercar is fast, because with a 7.3 liter, hand-fettled and lightened Mercedes V12, it should be. There is little point in me saying that it handles well, because given the hours it has spent in the Mercedes wind tunnel honing its aerodynamics, it can't possibly be too shabby at the limit.

And there is little point in me telling you it is exclusive, because with the car's immense price tag, you would already have assumed that. But for the record, it takes 9 months to hand-build a Zonda. It takes 2700 man-hours just to hand-lay the Zonda's carbon fiber body. Contrast this with the 15 clock hours it takes to assemble the average production car.

Seeing the car for the first time, I can assure you that it delivers a comprehensive assault on all your senses. It's easy for a car enthusiast to be bowled over by its exquisite finish, the richness of its detailing, or its sheer road presence. But as my day with the car wore on, I could not help but feel that there was something that was unsettling me slightly.

Sifting through the cabin, the engine bay, and the unpainted carbon fiber body, there was something about this car that was wholly unfamiliar to me.

The speedometer goes from 0 to an indicated 390km/h in a strange, italicized serif font with nary a care for legibility. Lovely carbon fiber speaker enclosures sited just behind the headrests are incongruously capped in Clarion speaker grilles with chromed plastic logos. The incredibly comfortable and beautifully detailed seats that took more than a year to develop have a faint logo embroidered onto them that do not seem to appear anywhere else on the car. (Further inspection reveals that the logo bears Horacio Pagani's initials.) The air-conditioning controls have a curvaceous design flourish that can best be described as notional.

Now, while these seem to be unbelievably trivial points in considering as awesome a proposition as the Zonda, it got me interpreting the car in a new light. Indeed, this car started to become an interesting counterpoint to something that has been disturbing me about new cars in general, other supercars included.