Pagani Zonda "La Nonna". A One Million Kilometer Long Story

As many of you already know it's one year that I work with Lovecars, the first automotive social hub, and for this reason I am a little less active on Prototype 0. A few days ago I visited the Pagani factory and I met a very special car. I want to repost here the article I wrote yesterday on Lovecars. Enjoy!

Yesterday I visited the Pagani factory with some friends who had never been before. The last time I was there was the occasion of the annual Pagani gathering. A lot of thing have changed since that...

The new factory is about to be completed and all the cars under assembly there are completely new. But the thing that impressed me the most was one of the cars showcased in the old factory showroom.

To be exact, I'm talking about the Pagani Zonda Prototype 2, or better known by the alias "La Nonna". This car hasn't appeared for the last two years and it's just been restored for the occasion of Horacio's sixtieth birthday.




You are probably wondering why it's called "La Nonna", well, the english translation is "grandmother". The nickname was assigned by the workers over the years because this is the oldest Zonda there was; but this is no longer technically true...

The car was built in 1998 as a Zonda C12 equipped with the first version of the mighty M120 engine, at the time it had a 6.0 litre engine capable of delivering around 394 hp pushing the car to over 330 km/h.



But the fate of this car was not to remain an elegant C12. In fact, being the factory prototype, in a short time it had been updated to the "C12-S 7.0" specific.

Over the years this car has developed all the components of each Zonda model until the brutal 760, except for the R's. Pagani, before building the new model, used to upgrade and test for many kilometers with this glorious example.

To date this car has covered more than ONE MILLION KILOMETERS and its restoration has been finished in order for it to be revealed in the future factory museum. The restoration has maintained faith to the historical configuration of this car, silver paint with red interior, but it has also had some aesthetic upgrades typical of the Cinque model.

Who knows, maybe a million kilometres is not enough and we will see this jewel shine once again on the Italian roads, who knows maybe the next Vanishing Point. The gallery below shows this Zonda during the various steps of its history.