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Michael Taylor12 Oct 2011
NEWS

Pagani Huayra too dirty for USA

Supercar maker Pagani is battling to get US certification for its newest supercar. But it's slowly winning the war...

Pagani has taken a last-minute side-step around certification troubles that threatened to turn its all-new Huayra supercar into a track-day special.

Already postponed despite being shown at exclusive events to customers around the world, the AMG V12-powered Huayra has struggled to meet stringent US crash and emissions standards.

Pagani told motoring.com.au that it had hoped to qualify for US market homologation on its technical and engineering data alone. However, it fell foul of the same procedures that caught out Lotus with its Evora.

The low-volume, independently-owned Italian supercar maker, famed for its original Zonda range, has now re-engineered the Huayra's crash behaviour to include the two-stage passenger airbags demanded by US officials. It believes it has now cleared the final hurdle to sell cars in what it sees as its most lucrative market.

"They will often accept your engineering data for your first car, which they did with the Zonda, but they will want to see you meet everything for a second one, and that's what's happened here," observed one industry source close to the issue.

Another key Pagani supplier confirmed the same thing, insisting: "In US homologation, you get one free hit but they make you pass everything the second time, which Lotus also found out."

Company founder, Horatio Pagani, has a wealth of experience in carbon-fibre and the Huayra has a monocoque chassis made from a unique carbon-fibre and titanium weave. It breaks further from supercar tradition by using carbon-fibre sub-frames front and rear to, respectively, hold the engine/gearbox and act as an energy-absorbing crash structure.

Besides crash homologation, the other US homologation issue the Huayra has is its emissions. Sources say the car has failed emission tests.

The dry-sumped 6.0-litre Mercedes V12 -- prepared to Pagani specifications by AMG to have 515kW and 1000Nm -- has not met US test limits despite being engineered with them in mind.

"From our point of view, the problem is that the show car is also the homologation car, and it gets fired up for customers, then driven a handful of metres to show them it runs, then it gets driven back again -- 10 or 20 metres at a time," an AMG source told motoring.com.au.

"That being done repeatedly has fatally poisoned the catalyst on the test car, so it won't pass emissions regulations. That's easy to fix, though. They just fit it with a new engine."

The rear-wheel drive supercar runs an XTrac gearbox and weighs a claimed 1350kg, with 0-100km/h times said to be in the sub 3.0 second range.

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Written byMichael Taylor
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