The Race Car That Sounds Like an F1 V10

Most hypercars chase numbers. Pagani chases a 500-year-old idea. Horacio Pagani has spent his life building cars where art meets science — a principle he first met as a teenager in a book on Leonardo da Vinci — and the track-only Huayra R Evo Roadster may be its purest expression yet.
The proof showed up in the wind tunnel. The car was already brutally efficient when the team changed certain details purely because they found them more beautiful — and it came back more aerodynamically efficient still. "Either we were lucky," they shrug, "or da Vinci was right."
The shape is a love letter to the long-tail Le Mans racers of the 1960s, Horacio's beloved Porsche 917 chief among them; the open cockpit was born at an IndyCar race, where he pictured a Pagani protected by little more than a sliver of polycarbonate. Counterintuitively, taking the roof off doesn't cost downforce — it adds five percent. Flat out, the car presses onto the road harder than it weighs.
At its heart is a decision the team calls purely emotional: a 6.0-litre V12 built with the German motorsport house HWA, 900 horsepower, and not a single turbo. The great racing cars, they argue, were as beautiful to hear as to behold. The side mirrors — shaped, they insist, like a woman's eyes — are the only part carried over from the road car.
For the verdict that counts, we asked the man who drove it. "It's a true race car," says test driver Jamie, "but the interior isn't like a race car — it's a beautiful place to be." No exposed bars, no battery at your elbow. Roof off, the cockpit fills with daylight, yet you hear neither wind nor engine until you ask for it. His favourite part is the motor: "the nearest thing you can buy today that sounds like a V10 F1 car."
Art and science. Luck, or da Vinci. Either way, it sings.