pagani huayra. piece-by-piece. just the beginning?

The radical design of the Pagani Huayra has got us thinking: are we about to see a new wave of ‘extreme’ supercar design?

What you’re looking at here are all the components that go together to create the new 730hp, 6.0-litre biturbo V12-powered Huayra,Pagani’s super slick follow-up to the Zonda (and if you’re wondering where inspiration for the name came from, look no further).

Now while Pagani has done an excellent job confirming that the new model has completed 700,000km of dynamics tests with five prototype models across varying landscapes and weather conditions, and that 85 orders had already been taken before the seven-year development cycle had even been completed, they were a little less specific with regards to the image above: save laboriously counting each individual piece and eventually seeing the matrix through our MacBook screens, ‘a couple of thousand’ is about as close as we can get.

No matter, since this image has brought up quite an interesting debate in the crankandpiston oval office. The current trend for super and hypercar design at the moment, it would seem, is that the ‘clean and clinical’ approach has been deposited in the bin, with ‘wild and radical’ taking its place at the design easel. The Lamborghini Veneno and LaFerrari for instance caused a huge stir at the Geneva Motor Show by showcasing extreme designs few had seen coming.

Even McLaren, sick to death of criticism regarding its ‘conservative’ approach to the MP4-12C‘s design has gone a bit wild with the crayons and developed the far more radical (and curvaceous) P1. Thoughts and opinions on these new looks have varied wildly, as they have also done with the Huayra. But isn’t that kind of the point with a supercar?

crankandpiston is wondering then if this is just the first wave of a new approach to super and hypercar design. That a renaissance in uber mental concepts may be just around the corner.