Pagani Codalunga
It makes 829bhp. It’s worth over £7m. Only five will be built. And we’ve had a world-exclusive drive in it: the new Pagani Codalunga
The mercury is hovering in low single figures, wet asphalt and winter gloom conspiring to keep tyre temperature well below optimum. The narrow Italian road, no more than the width of a car and a half, snakes ahead. Or at least I imagine it does, because the mist is so heavy that visibility is reduced to mere metres.
The tarmac beneath the wheels is no treacle-smooth racetrack – instead it harbours nasty off-camber sections and hidden fractures, both lying in wait to spit an errant wheel into the gutter.
And our chosen car for this delightful setting? The one-of-five Pagani Codalunga, seven million quid’s worth of hand-built beauty. Rear-wheel drive, bi-turbo V12, 829bhp, and enough bespoke carbonfibre to make an F1 team blush. When Horacio Pagani and his team were creating this exquisite car at the factory near Modena, the mood board did not contain today’s conditions.
First gear engaged, every sinew of the Codalunga is begging to be given more freedom. Even at low speed, the single-clutch robotised manual wants to hunt forward, eager to get on with things.
But here we must pause, because the car deserves a proper introduction. The Codalunga is what happens when billionaires are bored. In a world where those at the very top of the Forbes rich list struggle to set themselves apart from their mega-wealthy pals, the Codalunga is a limited-run variant of the already niche Huayra, of which Pagani has built 300, a figure that’s hardly troubling the Toyota Corolla in the record books.
It’s important that you remove all sense of reason or real-world thought when contemplating these cars and these customers. I’m not being all Jeremy Corbyn here – fantastically wealthy people can, on the whole, spend their money as they see fit as far as I’m concerned; the point is that the parameters within which most of the world operates simply don’t apply.
They don’t want normal cars from normal car companies. It’s why they have a direct line to the man whose name is above the door and why the client/company relationship is so vital to Pagani. The company operates with a mantra of ‘our customer is our work-giver’, with Pagani himself under no illusions as to how vital they are: ‘They are our number-one asset. We have a very direct relationship to them and they enjoy that the story [of Pagani] is real.’
The Codalunga is what happens when billionaires are bored: a limited run of the Huayra hypercar
In fact, two customers are the very reason the Codalunga came to be. Both multiple Pagani owners, the pals approached the firm back in 2018 with a very brief brief, foc
