The Pagani Huayra Codalunga Speedster Is A Stretched 852bhp Roadster

Is the Pagani Huayra the new Pagani Zonda? Not in the obvious sense that it was originally developed as the Zonda’s replacement, but in the sense that it just refuses to die. Even a good few years after we first saw the Utopia, the Huayra’s own replacement, new variants are still popping up.

Variants like this, the Huayra Codalunga Speedster, an open-roofed version of the stretched Codalunga coupe from a few years back. That means it gets the same elongated bum (‘codalunga’ is Italian for ‘longtail’), but now has a detachable roof panel. When in place, it has a panoramic glass element to let light spill into the cockpit; when it’s removed, it reveals a dramatically chopped, Speedster-style windscreen. And lets you hear your engine a bit more.

Said engine is a familiar one, Mercedes-AMG’s 6.0-litre twin-turbo V12, with lots of Pagani-specific tweaks. It produces 852bhp and 811lb ft of torque, and breathes through a six-way titanium exhaust system. Top speed is electronically pinned to 217mph.

Where it gets really special is the gearbox, though. It’s a seven-speed Xtrac unit, but following its Huayra debut in last year’s Epitome, you can spec a proper H-pattern manual as well as a semi-auto paddleshift.

The rest of the spec sheet, as usual for a Pagani, reads like the wildest, most fevered imaginings of every chassis engineer in the world: a monocoque made of Pagani’s own composite materials with names like carbo-tanium and carbo-triax; independent double wishbone suspension with variable rate springs and coaxial shocks; and Brembo carbon ceramic brakes with mighty 410mm discs and six-pot callipers at the front.

The interior is just as staggering. You get Pagani’s usual blend of steampunk and art deco aesthetics, with gorgeous analogue dials and, if you spec the manual (you should spec the manual), an open shift gate above an exposed linkage. We might need to lie down for five minutes after looking at this.

The seats and dash are trimmed in a new fabric blend, developed especially for the Codalunga Speedster. Its pattern of repeating circles is a nod to Pagani’s iconic quartet of exhausts, and features over 450,000 individual stitches.

We can’t even begin to imagine the sort of cheque you’d need to write to get your hands on one of these, but at any rate, only 10 are being built. If you fancy one and have a large enough bank account/reserve of gold bullion, you can expect to get your hands on your car next year.