Pagani ZondaPagani Zonda

The Zonda was the first car Pagani ever made. It came out in 1999, and it was almost called something else. Horacio Pagani wanted to name it after Juan Manuel Fangio, the Argentinian racing driver who'd helped him get started. When Fangio died before the car was finished, Pagani changed the name out of respect. He named it after the Zonda instead, a hot, dry wind that comes down off the Andes in Argentina.

Getting there took most of the nineties. Pagani ran a small company in Modena doing carbon fibre work for other car makers, and used it to pay for his own car on the side. The Zonda is what those years of other people's projects were funding.

It's an old school car in the best way. A big Mercedes V12 with no turbos, so the power comes in a long straight line and the sound keeps climbing all the way to the top of the revs. Most versions have a manual gearbox. There's very little electronics between you and what the car is doing, which makes it hard to drive fast and very honest about it when you get it wrong. In 2010 a track only version, the Zonda R, set the fastest lap a car of its kind had done at the Nürburgring. It was already more than ten years after the first Zonda.

The body is carbon fibre, and Pagani is famous for how it lines up. The weave runs straight across the panels, from one piece to the next, as if the whole car were cut from a single sheet. At the back, four exhaust pipes sit together in a tight cluster in the middle, and that's become one of the most recognisable details on any car.

It was supposed to end years ago. Pagani kept getting asked for one more by people who wanted a Zonda of their own, and kept building special ones, each slightly different, for a long time after the official last car. That's why the number built is so hard to pin down.

It's the one that started the obsession for me, and it's still the one I'd pick first. The Huayra is the more complete car. The Zonda has more character, the kind that newer cars, with all their systems, don't really have room for. If the collection ever becomes real, this is the centrepiece.