Anniversaries are so overrated! Pagani saw this for themselves at the Monterey Car Week. What was supposed to be a celebration soon transformed into a panic moment. Everyone thought the supercar was on fire. Watching a Pagani Utopia burn is heart-wrenching indeed. It is an over 2-million dollar vehicle, and a fire would mean there is one less in the world of the 99 to be built.
But as bad as the scene caught on video looks, it is not what it seems. What everyone thought to be smoke was actually fire extinguishing powder. And luckily, there was no fire in the first place.
The "smoke" – which was not actually smoke, as we have already sorted it out – seemed to come out of the engine compartment of the Pagani Utopia, while the model was on display at the Monterey Car Week, with the engine switched off, at 11:20 a.m. on Friday.
Horacio Pagani’s son, Cristopher, the company’s head of marketing, explained the situation to Road and Track: "A guest of the event was touching switches on the inside of the car and set off the engine’s self containers fire extinguishers," he explained.
So it is simple as that: a car show attendee set off the fire extinguisher by touching buttons and switches even though he had no idea what they were there for. If you take a look at the center console of the Utopia, you will give that guy credit. There are so many controls there that it takes a lifetime to understand what each is doing. But sometimes, keeping our hands to ourselves can... save anniversaries.
Photo: On Fire Garage | Instagram
Because one thing is for sure. The curious attendee wrecked the supercar's debut in North America and the company's 25th anniversary just because he played around the dashboard and center console. Furthermore, the Pagani Utopia is not exactly a car one should go around and press buttons in.
Introduced back in September 2022, after six years in development, the model, originally codenamed C10, came as a replacement for the Huayra. The Pagani Utopia is powered by a mid-mounted AMG-sourced twin-turbocharged V12 engine, either mated to an automatic or to something we don't get much in supercars these days: a manual transmission.
The seven-speed unit, developed in partnership with Xtrac, is mounted transversally and works alongside an electro-mechanical differential.
That power plant develops 852 horsepower (864 PS) and 811 lb-ft (1,100 Nm) of torque to pull only 2,822 pounds (1,280 kilograms), which is just around how much a crossover SUV would weigh.
Pagani is only producing 99 examples of their third model. And all 99 of them were instantly assigned to customers willing to pay a starting price of $2.19 million.
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