Aston Vantage driven!
New Vantage. On road and track. At last
THERE’S A SEQUENCE of corners at the Portimao race circuit in Portugal where the new Aston Martin Vantage’s strengths settle right between the crosshairs. It starts when you pop over a blind brow and run downhill towards the fishhook Turn 6. You probably braked sooner on your first laps, but experience says you can leave it much later, so you hold the throttle flat in fifth long after the kerbing starts strobing red and white. With the gravel trap rushing up, finally you stand on the pedal and the optional carbon-ceramic brakes wipe off speed like a child skipping into a conservatory door.
You drop three gears – crisp, quick shifts the lot of them – kiss the apex in second, then feed in the torque as you run back up the hill. Third pulls hard, fourth barely registers the higher ratio or increasing uphill gradient as 505lb ft gets toiling. The track’s damp, so pull for fifth before you tease it through the fast-left kink at the crest, give the brakes a quick dab and drop to fourth when you’re straight.
Take a deep breath and commit to the fast downhill right-hander – the Vantage pivots for the apex, the rear slips obediently out of line with the fluidity of Tesco’s best-maintained trolleys and you glide out to the kerbing in the most beautifully balanced four-wheel drift. A few laps in and already you’re asking where you sign and how much it costs. Ah, yes, that… The new Vantage costs £120,900. The last model was pitched just a little above a Porsche 911 Carrera S, but the new one misses its braking point at one-notch-higher Carrera GTS money and stops just £8k shy of the 911 Turbo with a squeal of tyres and judder of ABS. Similarly, performance slots between the two 911s, with 503bhp, 0- 62mph in 3.6 seconds and a 195mph top whack courtesy of a twin-turbocharged 4.0-litre V8 sourced from Mercedes-AMG.
I won’t blame you if you buy without so much as a test drive. The proportions of the old Vantage are still echoed in the long bonnet and Manx-cat tail, but there’s a complexity and definition to the steel bodywork’s muscle tone that betrays a giant leap in production processes. Looks great.
The interior feels similarly racey. The seats are low-set, comfortable yet supportively bolstered, the windscreen dramatically raked, the glasshouse like a hot-rod from American Graffiti. The leather and alcantara finishes impress, the central digital speedo provides a kind of fighter-jet theatre to proceedings, and the Mercedes infotainment is a quantum leap to what went before – later, the little controller will budge back slightly and a manual gearstick will sprout from here. Shame some of the buttons seem very oddly positioned – it took entire laps to find the traction control. And the quality falters sporadically: the buttons that control drive modes from the steering wheel click unresponsively and unconvincingly. All too often you’re not sure whether you’ve engaged a mode, and have to scroll through them all to check. The air- con controls and paddleshifters look cheap, especially finished in silver; graphite looks better. Underneath, the Vantage’s bonded aluminium platform is derived from the larger DB11, and you get the same double-wishbone front and multi-link rear suspension, but naturally the springs and dampers have specific tuning overseen by vehicle attribute boss Matt Becker (who learnt his trade at Lotus), and the 20-inch Pirelli P Zeroes are bespoke too. The rear suspension subframe is solidly mounted – the DB11 gets mushier, more comfort-focused bushings – and there’s an electronically controlled differential, a first for Aston Martin. Some of these changes can be felt a soon as you move away. Aston has gone for a much more aggressive set-up on the Vantage compared with the DB11, something evidenced by adjustable settings for the chassis and powertrain that kick off in Sport (not GT like the DB11), and move through Sport Plus and Track levels of seriousness. The suspension does a great job of wafting over some pretty fragmented bumps, especially considering how focused it is, but it also feels very tightly controlled over sharper undulations, even in that initial Sport setting – at times it’s like you’re the toddler being given a ‘tractor ride’ on a parent’s knee. And plenty of road noise seeps up through that unpartitioned boot and from the fat 295-section rear tyres.
The standard exhaust system is noisy, but this is a good kind of noisy, a deep, rich, bassy noisiness that’d get a lion tamer sprinting, even if the occasional pops and bangs on the overrun are more measured than those of the AMG GT. This is more than a substitute for the old 4.7’s flamboyance – and the sports system is like removing your earplugs in comparison. I’d never tire of it, although there are times when I’d be glad of the don’t-wake-the-neighbours button.
Already, on the autoroute, the 4.0-litre turbo V8 feels much stronger than it does in the perfectly-fast- enough DB11, not because it is – 503bhp and 505lb ft is near-as- dammit the same – but because the Vantage is 129kg lighter, sings louder to take care of the psychological side of things, and drops4
its final- drive ratio from 2.7:1 to 2.9:1. This engine always feels ‘on’, pulling from little over idle speed, with a big kick at 2400rpm, and a relentless pull to the 7000rpm redline, like there are two Red Bulls as well as twin turbos plumbed into the engine’s vee. There’s a trigger-happy yet surprisingly controllable reaction to every little throttle twitch; it has performance everywhere, and yet delivers it in incrementally more thrilling bursts. A Carrera GTS might be around 160kg lighter than the 1630kg Aston, but no one told the V8.
Like the engine, the gearbox feels transformed compared to the version in the DB11. It’s still an eight-speed auto, still a transaxle positioned between the rear wheels to complement the front-mid-mounted engine and help hit the 50:50 weight distribution. The shifts are as subtle as you like for low-speed mooching, but now punch with more mechanical conviction, if not with any greater speed. Smoke and mirrors, yes, but all this calibration and dialling in of emotion is what separates the best modern cars from the merely very good.
Last month, we got to grips with a final-verification prototype on an ice-rink in Northern Finland, but the near- deserted N267 winding over Portuguese hillsides provides a more instructive insight. Despite being no faster than a DB11’s, the electric steering feels significantly more responsive. Try to trick it with almost imperceptible inputs and it’ll respond eagerly, and feeds back with both a chunky if not overly heavy detailing and a wieldiness that immediately makes the Vantage feel nimble.
It’ll swoop in to corners as quick as you can eye the apex, carves like it needs a dictionary to decode understeer, and controls its limited body roll with a progressive, firmly cushioned authority. Clearly, powerslides are up for grabs, yet it’s possible to drive neatly within the stability control settings on the road without feeling like you just pressed the nitrous button in a Fast & Furious film.
All this translates rather well to the Portimao racetrack, a place that rubbishes any notions that modern tracks must be
THE SPEED OF THE VANTAGE IS NOT LOST AMID THE RELENTLESSNESS OF THIS INCREDIBLE PLACE
sanitised. Just a decade old, it rollercoasters over the terrain like someone’s tarmacked over Roadrunner’s tracks. Abrupt stops, big- commitment curves, blind crests, scary speed – it’s all present and correct.
The Vantage is right at home, still feeling eager to change direction, and still composed in the way it resists body roll and understeer (unless you go out of your way to trigger it). The way it tries to come back into line if you really provoke it is a little aggressive, and it’s much sweeter when you just drive it hard. And, of course, there’s that magic run through Turn 8, where you revel in the sweet adjustability of the Vantage’s chassis. Some of the faster, longer turns did induce an irritating lateral oscillation from the rear axle, while at low speeds the traction needs careful attention if you switch all the stability systems off.
The speed of the Vantage is not lost amid the relentlessness of this incredible place. There’s also no doubt that a mid- engined machine would feel more agile still, nor that a Porsche 911 feels a purer sports car with less weight to manage, and that the Vantage could fizz with a little more communication, both through your driving gloves and corduroys. But the Vantage already feels like a great sports car, one with a ruthless turn of speed and a chassis entirely in balance with it all.
There are, of course, more variants coming. An entry-level version could work well with the new AMG 53 six-cylinder engine, something that would reduce the Vantage’s hefty price tag and make this an even more accessible drive. Aston boss Andy Palmer insists it won’t happen. ‘ This,’ he says, ‘is already our Ferrari Dino.’ But there are nods and winks – if not outright confirmation – that the stronger 4.0-litre V8 from the 604bhp Mercedes E63 S will find its way under that bonnet, and that the DB11’s V12 will definitely fit too. Great car already, but the Vantage journey only gets more serious from here.