The Lamborghini years.
The passionate relationship began many years before Horacio Pagani started working for the Modenese manufacturer. He was fascinated by Bertone design: he admired his work and felt a great harmony of style with the designer, father of the most fascinating Lamborghini of all time, the Miura and Countach.
The passionate relationship began many years before Horacio Pagani started working for the company based in Sant’Agata. He was fascinated by Bertone’s style: he admired his work and felt a great harmony of style with the designer, father of the most fascinating Lamborghini of all time, the Miura and Countach. The meeting with Alfieri proved successful. The engineer was impressed by the works shown and ended up offering him to join a project that had just started, the LM. Horacio Pagani was the first to believe in the technology of composite materials; against the will of Lamborghini, he bought an autoclave at his own expense to develop, even for the same Lamborghini, new solutions for the body and the chassis.
The P140 was supposed to be a “small” Lamborghini to be launched together with the emerging Diablo which would replace the Countach, as top-of-production model. The Pagani’s P140 anticipates some of the solutions that will be adopted many years later on the Gallardo. In 1985 Horacio Pagani and his team built the very first car entirely made of composite materials, the Countach Evoluzione, which will lay the basis for all future applications of carbon fiber and composite materials in the automotive industry. Two years later, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the company, Lamborghini decided to resume the restyling of the Countach and the project was entrusted to Horacio Pagani and this represented a great opportunity for him. He sketched some solutions for the new parts of the car, which were then realized and had an extraordinary commercial success. In the early 90s Horacio tried his hand in the design of a new car, which should have been produced for the 30th anniversary of the company.
The project, called L30, never saw the light, but the formal research made by Pagani continued until the definition of the 1:15 scale model. In the same period Horacio worked together with the Lamborghini team to carry on with the project of the Diablo 30th Anniversary, for which he designed a certain number of components, including the front bumper. Other restyling projects, such as the Grand Cherokee that had been conceived for the giant Chrysler, were well under way when had to be suspended, since the company was overwhelmed by the terrible economic situation caused by the Gulf War. The impasse created by the war and the overseas crisis convinced Pagani to steer his own research elsewhere. Since very little of his intense project work had seen the light in terms of cars actually produced, he decided to give life to his most ambitious dream: his own supercar. In this creative process he synthesized all the best design elements appeared in previous projects.
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