Aston Martin isn’t holding back with its new Vantageroad car and GT3 race car. We examine both
by JETHRO BOVINGDON & YOUSUF ASHRAF PHOTOGRAPHY by ASTON PARROTT
AFULLTECHNICALSPECIFICATION for the new Vantage drops into my inbox a couple of days before I get to see it in the raw. I think I know what to expect. A decent hike in power. A few less kilos. A bit more intensity in all areas and some much slicker interior tech. As it turns out, I am very wide of the mark. In fact, I’m not sure anyone has guessed quite the scale of the evolutionary step the Vantage is taking. Not so much a facelift as a metamorphosis from sports car to supercar. The power figure leaps out. Even though we’re all enlightened enough to know that power in and of itself is not a key metric for measuring a driver’s car, here it feels like a statement. The previous Vantage had 503bhp. The hardcore F1 edition bumped that up to 527bhp. These are pretty big numbers. However, Aston Martin no longer deals in pretty big numbers. The new focus on performance demands class-leading power and power-to-weight. Aston’s new entry-level sports car has 656bhp and does 202mph with 0-60mph in 3.4sec. Gulp. It will cost around £165,000, a substantial increase of £23,000 over an F1 Edition but around £15,000 less than a Porsche 911 Turbo S.
Taken at face value it would appear that the Vantage story has taken a completely new direction, then. The look, which we’ll come on to, is evolutionary, but the dynamic performance has taken a fascinating and radical route. And yet attributes and performance director Simon Newton is clear that the Vantage is still authentically Aston Martin. ‘If you think of Vantage as the epitome of an Aston front-engine rear-drive car, it is still true to that. We never wanted the new car to be over-controlled, too heavily damped or over-assisted. Essentially, we wanted it to be fun to drive.’
Perhaps sensing my scepticism that the engineers could simultaneously up the power by more than 30 per cent and make the Vantage easier, more fluid and more accessible, Newton continues by addressing the fears that you might share, too. ‘Don’t think that because we’ve got all that power it’s now like an AMG product, for example,’ he begins. ‘It’s very much true to Aston. It still breathes with the road and it still has that fun-to-drive character. The difference is we’ve raised the performance capability around that identity.’ A Vantage as we know it, then. Only elevated to a new performance high and, we’re assured, offering gre
