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Horacio Pagani
Topics: Argentine Italians Italian-Argentines
Horacio Pagani is the founder of Pagani Autmobili S.p.A. He is an Argentinian-Italian, born in the small town of Casilda, Santa Fe, Argentina, a rural town in an agricultural country. He was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of bakers. He fell in love with cars when he saw his first copy of Style Auto magazine, a forerunner of today's Auto & Design. He began to craft his own models of cars with primitive tools. Knowing that cars had to be designed by someone, that they did not just happen, motivated him to study industrial design at La Plata University, but student political activity during the years of the military dictatorship closed the school for three years. He tried his hand at customizing his father's Torino, a hodgepodge of a car with a Rambler American body restyled by Pininfarina, powered by an old Kaiser L-head engine fitted with an OHC cylinder head conversion, made and marketed by Renault. He liked the hands-on aspect of working directly with metal, but he went twenty-five miles away to Rosario to study engineering all the same. The school's rote, noncreative approach was all wrong for him, so he decided to design his own educational curriculum, starting with studying the life of Leonardo da Vinci, his great inspiration and model, and trying to figure out manufacturing methods on his own.
He was fascinated by materials, he says, and established his own small shop, making chairs and tooling for bending tubes. In 1977, he designed and built travel trailers, including their suspensions. Because he could work with fiberglass, he was asked to rebody a race car. He did the job in only three weeks, the car came in second in its first post-Pagani outing, and the die was cast. He would design and build a racing car from scratch, a single-seater fitting a local Renault-powered promotional formula.
It took a year, working after dinner each evening. Pagani designed every part, including the brakes , and his project came in 88 pounds lighter than others in the category. That car sits in the Pagani showroom in a Modena suburb today, showing a lot of very original thinking, in particular in the arrangement of springs, shocks, and roll bars entirely within the body. The rear subframe bolted onto the rest of the chassis, allowing easy changes of wheelbase. Altogether, Horacio Pagani Competicion made just four cars, but they caught the eye of Argentina's greatest driver, Juan Manuel Fangio, whose influence certainly smoothed the way for Automobili Pagani to source its engines from Mercedes-Benz decades later.
Related websites
"What the mind thinks, the hand creates", Horacio Pagani interviewed
Horacio Pagani biography (Spanish language)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Horacio Pagani
