A Worthy Inaugural Car of the Week winner!
Welcome to the inaugural Petroleum Car of the Week! This is a competition in our Discord server in which the members post their nominations for a Car of the Week, and the most upvoted car among them each Saturday gets its own article here! And what could be a better first winner than the mighty Pagani Zonda Cinque? This special Zonda established itself as one of the most iconic supercars of all time, and its V12 soundtrack is definitely to die for. Let’s take a look at this glorious car further and see why it’s one of the greatest ever made.
The High Five: A Victorious Zonda in the Making
The Zonda Cinque (”Five” in Italian) came to life in 2008 and supposed to be the final iteration of the supercar, commissioned by the Pagani dealer in Hong Kong. Only five of coupé and roadster models were made each, and all were sold out for $2,000,000. Sharing design cues with Zonda F and most of its parts from the track toy Zonda R, it is essentially a racing car for the road, and many of its parts are nothing like the previous Zonda models, including the all-new 6-speed manual gearbox that can shift in less than 100 milliseconds. Well, that definitely leads to a need of new pants for sure, because this new transmission comes with Comfort, Sport and Race settings, the latter of which managed to lower the 0 to 60 time to just 3.4 seconds. Though, it’s not just a simple rework of the previous Zonda, as things get even deeper when it comes to bodywork and powertrain.
You see, Pagani is not a manufacturer who would slap a few canards on their model, name it ”Extreme RR” and call it a day. The engineers perfected their blend of carbon and titanium (conveniently called carbo-titanium) on the bodywork, which not only lowered the curb weight but also made the Cinque a lot tougher and rigid than its predecessors. This witchcraft worked so well, Pagani is still using this recipe to this day, and we really cannot blame them, as Cinque only weighs 1210 kg (2667 lbs), 20 kilograms lighter than the Zonda F. Sacrificing looks for performance is not in the Pagani dictionary, however, so half of the body of the Cinque is adorned with carbon fiber and red stripes, creating an iconic color trio that you can easily distinguish even if you see it in pixels. Further advancements include a full suspension system with magnesium and titanium parts and with a front splitter and canards, this road-legal Zonda could go around corners just as fast and nimble as a Zonda R, and the praise definitely can’t go higher than that.
The piece de resistance of all of this is an even more glorified version of the iconic 7.3L naturally-aspirated AMG V12 engine that was derived from SL 73 AMG and used by Pagani ever since the introduction of Zonda C12. This iteration had even lighter camshaft and a better flywheel, and the power was increased to 671 HP and 780 nm. To compare, the 2006 Zonda F produced 594 HP and 760 nm, which shows an immense increase as we are used to seeing special edition cars with so little power gap between the standard car, and the lighter body demonstrates how huge of a leap this was for Pagani. This huge accomplishment meant that the Cinque conquered the whole Zonda lineup on mainstream media, being added to prominent video games and highly praised by other motoring journalists to the moon. Richard Hammond, for example, has always stated that Zonda is his favourite supercar, so testing the Cinque, I’m pretty sure he felt something in his pants. Can we blame him? This is still the most iconic Zonda ever made, and it’s likely to stay that way for decades to come. Housing a naturally aspirated V12 that sounds like Zeus on Monday syndrome, it’s likely to stay on the top of the mountain for most petrolheads.
So this is it folks, hope you enjoyed our Car of the Week! If you want to join us in COTW competitions, join our Discord server using the link right here and join our ever growing family! https://discord.gg/petroleum
