Since the Pagani Zonda celebrated its debut At the Geneva Motor Show in 1999, I tried to understand why People think it looks good. Built to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the original Zonda, the European Institute of Design I put together this beautiful, flowing conceptual update to the long-time Zonda, called Alisea.
From the strange, bulbous little eyes to the spindly rearview mirrors and the angular sharpness everywhere, the original Pagani has always had an enigmatic and unspectacular shape. Obviously the Zonda is a technological marvel of speed, and every detail of the car’s construction is crafted with handcrafted perfection, but I’ve always found it to be an eyesore. The Alisea is almost perfect.
Where the Zonda is disjointed and incomplete, the Alisea looks accomplished and sophisticated. This is a car that continues its sweeping elegance from front to back, but does so in a way that retains the sleek minimalism of the Zonda without resorting to the bulky and ineffective lines of the Huayra or Utopia. Someone really needs to take the design pen out of Horacio’s hands. Let him work on the technical side, where he excels, but his forms get completely out of control.
Alisea was a final project put together by a group of 24 design students taking the Transport Design Master’s program at IED Torino. They deserve recognition for this work and hope that their expertise will inform car design around the globe for decades to come. Keep an eye on these names, I think they’ll go far.
Andrea Boffa (Italy), Enrichetta Maria Borsano (Italy), Ludwig Brenninkmeijer (Netherlands), Daria Butenko (Russia), Andrea Caibugatti (Italy), Joan De La Plata Perich (Spain), Mausam Pramod Dhande (India), Aayush Dutta ( India), Sharang Kulkarni (India), Txomin Munitxa Arrinda (Spain), Yash Vishnubhai Panchal (India), Simon Rapisarda (Australia), Hariprasad Uthaman Chukkasseri (India), Jayakrishnan Anandan (India), Sara Cancelli (Italy), Pablo Alejandro Hidrobo Lapuerta (Ecuador), Pritish Karmi (India), Tomas Knaze (Slovakia), Vaibhav Krishna (India), Ya-Hsin Liu (Taiwan – Formosa), Luis David Parra Rubio (Mexico), Davide Patruno (Italy), Jincheng Tian (China), Rongning Xue (China).
The project was supported by OZ Racing, Pirelli and Lechler.
Alisea proves that Horacio Pagani was on the right track with the Zonda all those years ago, but it just needed a bit of tweaking to be this good. Perhaps through 1999 eyes, achieving true design greatness would not have been possible at all. With 25 years of tweaks, Pagani’s designs have gotten worse, but these students have managed to strip them down to the essentials and kick ass in the process.
Many of the Zonda’s signature design elements were carried over, including the central exhaust with four outlets at the rear, the thin mirror stalks protruding from the A-pillars, the forward-facing cockpit and the curved front wheel arches. It’s unmistakably a Pagani without making the same design mistakes as the original.
Everything I couldn’t figure out about the Zonda became much clearer in a direct comparison with Alisea. I love her. I would go through hell for her.