Pagani’s 25th-anniversary celebrations at the Monterey Car Week last Friday included a smokey incident with the Utopia. According to Pagani, the smoke was caused by the vehicle’s integrated fire extinguisher which was accidentally activated by a show attendee.
A short video published on Instagram by @OnFireGarage shows the Pagani Utopia on the stand, with a lot of smoke coming out of the engine bay, very close to the passenger compartment. Initially, people believed that the vehicle caught fire, and a bystander can be heard asking for a fire extinguisher but things are not always as they seem. It turns out that the smoke was nothing more but a fire extinguisher discharge, something that makes more sense than the original scenario as the vehicle was stationary.
More: Watch A Black Pagani Utopia Roam Narrow Streets Of A Medieval Italian City
Christopher Pagani, the son of the company’s founder and CEO Horacio Pagani, spoke to Road and Track shedding more light on the peculiar incident: “A guest of the event was touching switches on the inside of the car and set off the engine’s self containers fire extinguishers”.
It seems that the ultra-expensive hypercar has a built-in system designed for the event of an engine fire which can be activated through a switch inside the cabin. We suppose that owners of the vehicle are well aware of this particular feature, unlike the clumsy guest who activated it for no reason in front of a big audience. According to witness Chris Corces who was present in Pagani’s show at The Quail: A Motorsport Gathering, the incident happened at 11.20 am on Friday and no one knew what happened at the time.
Pagani’s presence in this years’ Monterey Car Week came with an impressive display of all three generations of its exotic vehicles. A silver Zonda and a white Huayra were joined by a dark blue Pagani Utopia which made its first public appearance on U.S. soil. For those interested, all of the 99 examples of the Utopia are already spoken for, with each one costing around $2.5 million. The model comes fitted with an AMG-sourced twin-turbo 6.0-liter V12 producing 852 hp (627 kW / 864 PS) and 811 lb-ft (1,100 Nm) of torque without any kind of electrical assistance.
