Aston Martin Vanquish S Goodbye to our super-gt
A blissful marriage of sports car and luxury cruiser, the last of the old-school Astons will be fondly remembered
WHY WE RAN IT
For one last glorious hurrah to Aston’s era of ‘Vertical Horizontal’-based cars with big, normally aspirated V12s
What’s it like to live with a super-gt on a daily basis? That was the purpose of this test. And the simple answer is: super.
And Gtish, of course. Few cars do GT as well as the Aston Martin Vanquish S. Although those cars do include the Aston DB11, which is why the Vanquish received the upgrades that make it an ‘S’ about a year ago: they made it more powerful, helped it deliver the power a bit more keenly and made it noisier. The big, naturally aspirated V12 engine might be endangered, but the Vanquish S shows why it will be a such shame if it disappears completely. A 5.9-litre V12 sits at the front of the Vanquish S and it’s a thing of no small wonder. At 592bhp, it’s still some way short of the Ferrari F12’s 730bhp, which was the chief rival at the time of the Vanquish’s upgrades. And since then, the 812 Superfast has been launched with a fairly absurd 789bhp.
The next Vanquish, then, will have two turbochargers and more than 700bhp but, meanwhile, it will plod along to 2019 with this 5.9-litre unit that has its origins from the days when Aston was owned by Ford. It’s a cracking engine, wonderfully smooth – as anything with multiples of six inline cylinders is – yet soulful when you want it to be and just about muted enough when you don’t.
It’s not like 592bhp isn’t ‘enough’, anyway, is it? Granted, because it’s a naturally aspirated unit, you have to work the Aston engine to access all of its power, but that seems like no bad thing to me. It’s brisk enough at low to middling revs and, should you want more, you have to hang on to a lower gear. No bother. Although the ZF eight-speed auto, a transaxle ’box to maintain good weight distribution, wasn’t changed last year, its coupling to the propshaft was made more rigid. So it retains the smoothness of a torque converter auto, yet locks up and drives confidently very quickly. Not once in 7000 miles did I want for this to be a dual-clutch auto.
In fact, in 7000 miles in one of these, you don’t want for much else at all, and I genuinely don’t think that’s just because you feel spoilt. I’ve spoken with owners who say they spend more time in their Vanquishes than they ever expected to because it hits the mark in the right way. I know of potential owners who are thinking about hopping out of cars that may be more powerful but are more tiresome to drive. From what I’m told, the Ferrari FF/GTC4 Lusso and Aston Vanquish are the super-gts of choice for those who want to use them often – when they’re not driving a Range Rover or Volkswagen Golf R.
Because we were limited to 7000 miles in this car, the plan wasn’t to
use it all day, every day. But now and again, when it was my only set of wheels, I did precisely that: the school run, a nip to the Co-op. And, sure, it will do it. The service intervals are 10,000 miles, it used no oil, wore out no ancillaries. It cost nothing but fuel and depreciation: this £200k car is, on the forecourt, £185k or so now, given it was generously optioned.
And as a daily driver? Well, the +2 seats are small but, with the front passenger seat folded, you can even squeeze an adult in the back if you have to. The 368-litre boot is wellshaped too, with a wide opening that will accept golf bags relatively easily.
But it’s the long journeys, the special journeys, that are memorable in a car like this. I took it to Scotland once. It was so great I took it again. Sure, the standard infotainment is as fiddly as anything, but it will pair to a smartphone easily, which solves most of that problem. The ride quality was firm enough to be terrifically controlled but soft enough to never be tiresome, and while one of my colleagues thought the engine noise – exhaust, specifically – was a bit tedious, I didn’t meet anyone else who thought so. Maybe it’s a bit vocal on start-up – the latest DB11 has a ‘quiet start’ mode to alleviate that issue – but generally I think it has just the right amount of bark and soul for a super-gt car.
It’s even – and here’s something I didn’t expect to be writing, 7000 miles ago – relatively economical. “Perhaps you should use the right pedal more, then,” you might think, and perhaps you’re right, but I did my share of accelerating, hanging onto gears and driving through tunnels and past high walls a gear or two lower than I needed to, with the windows down. But there’s something about an over-capacity, unstressed – if you can call 100bhp per litre that – naturally aspirated engine that only has a relatively small car to push around. With vastly overdriven upper ratios that see it not much beyond idle at the motorway limit, this is a 24mpg car. If you drove like your sick cat was on the passenger seat, I reckon it could be a 27mpg, perhaps 28mpg, car.
But why would you want to do that? Unless you were actually going to the vet’s, obviously. No, the lovely thing about the Aston is that it feels like a super sports car when you want it to, a refined, luxurious cruiser when you don’t. Precisely how a super-gt is meant to feel.
It’s the long journeys, the special journeys, that are memorable in a car like this