EVO Car Reviews: Pagani Zonda F Roadster

Twenty years, hundreds of cars, tens of thousands of miles, and out of all that, just one drive I consider perfect. There’s clearly a slice of luck involved, though I have to say that when you’re driving a Pagani Zonda C12 in the Val d’Orcia in southern Tuscany, you need only a very thin slice of luck.

It was eight years ago and we were there with six supercars, putting together ‘The Test’ for issue 022. Late one afternoon we were convoying over to the cover shoot location, and as we reached the turning for the gravel road along which we’d have to travel to get there, everyone duly turned left off the main road, except me. I couldn’t help it, I simply had to have more of this Zonda, to scratch the itch, so I carried straight on and made a 30km loop, figuring they’d be a while setting up the shot. It was heaven; an extraordinarily beautiful and challenging road, its surface still warm from a day in the sun, and in my hands was the most involving and responsive supercar of all, considerately, tenderly wrung out.

It was a unique experience, a sublime moment that I have treasured ever since. Unrepeatable? Almost certainly. Not even worth trying? Affirmative. Or so I thought, until we managed to negotiate a drive in the last ever Zonda F, which would be transported from the factory to a location of our choice, within reason. And there seemed no good reason for that location not to be the best driving roads we know in Italy – the roads of the Val d’Orcia.

Such a venture comes with risks, the overriding and very obvious one being that, even though it’s a Zonda in the Val d’Orcia, it won’t be a perfect drive and the cherished memory of the one that was perfect might be sullied. And there was every chance of dreadful weather, this being early December. I weighed up the risks and considered them worth taking. I know, I know: brave and selfless. Yet I had a gut feeling that things would go right.

Almost immediately, they started to go wrong. As photographer Matt Vosper and I settled into our seats for our Ryanair flight to Pisa, we were informed that, due to fog, we wouldn’t be going to Pisa but would be landing at Genoa, 200km short, at midnight. Once there we spent two hours in a coach, followed by half an hour in a taxi queue. Vosper and I have barely warmed our hotel beds before we’re in another taxi heading back to Pisa airport to pick up our hire car and hit the road for southern Tuscany.

Not a great start, then, and it isn’t getting better. ‘You can shoot a car in any weather apart from fog,’ says Vosper. We’re within half an hour of our rendezvous point and it’s still not cleared. But moments later we round a bend in the A1 and the scene is crystal clear, the sun burning bright in a cloudless sky, the rolling scenery unmistakably Tuscan. We’re in business.

Well, I am. Just off the A1 junction for Chuisi, we meet up with Simone Tarozzi and Claudio Sotgiu from Pagani and lay our eyes on the Zonda. ‘It’s black,’ says Vosper, as if answering the unasked question ‘What would be the hardest colour to photograph in this harsh, late-morning light?’ It’s not painted, though, but is finished in perfect, lacquered carbonfibre – Pagani has always worked this material better than anyone else.