Aston Martin DBS Superleggera ROAD TEST
ROAD TEST No 5398 Will Aston’s Vanquish successor be the third hit in a row for its second-century plan?
MODEL TESTED DBS SUPERLEGGERA Price £225,000 Power 715bhp Torque 664lb ft 0-60mph 3.7sec 30-70mph in fourth 4.1sec Fuel economy 19.3mpg CO2 emissions 285g/km 70-0mph 42.1m
All of a sudden, there is a gap in the market. Admittedly, it is small and niche, but it is also enduring and meaningful. The gap pertains to large-capacity, frontengined ‘super’ grand tourers. These might be a rare sight on the road but they are among the most prestigious and best loved of all the exotic breeds, with the finest sporting pedigree.
Regular Autocar readers may have earlier surmised the gap in question might be Ferrari-shaped: specifically one best plugged by the 812 Superfast – but that car turned out to be more supercar than transcontinental express, and simply too overwhelmingly full-on to nail the traditional super-gt brief. It’s for this reason that an otherwise extraordinary Ferrari attracted only qualified praise during its road test this summer, and why Aston Martin now has a gilt-edged opportunity.
The car out to seize that opportunity is the new DBS Superleggera. This halo model would seem to emphatically tick every box on the most time-honoured checklist in the business. Presence and elegance are subjective matters, but the Superleggera unquestionably has them. So too a V12 engine with more power and torque than any full seriesproduction Aston to date. And most encouragingly, it’s arriving at a time when the chassis experts at Gaydon, spearheaded by eminent dynamics guru Matt Becker, have not only found their mojo but seem to build it with every new model.
These are interesting times for arguably the most famous British automotive marque. It is simultaneously settling into its new status as a public limited company, throwing open the shutters at a new plant in South Wales and weighing up the benefits of flying in components in the event of a no-deal you-knowwhat. But today we get to focus solely on what matters most. Is the DBS Superleggera worth its top-of-thepile status? And can it be considered the genre-defining machine the old Vanquish never quite was?
DESIGN AND ENGINEERING
If a super-gt’s success is best defined by sensational looks and an equally sensational powerplant, the DBS gets off to a flying start. Beneath the fronthinged carbonfibre clamshell sits the same twin-turbo 5.2-litre ‘Cologne’ V12 deployed in the DB11, only tickled electronically to heights of 715bhp and 664lb ft from a mere 1800rpm. The latter figure necessitated an all-new transaxle gearbox: ZF’S ultra-modern 96HP eight-speeder, though torque, sent rearwards via a carbonfibre propshaft, still has to be limited through the first two ratios in the interests of longevity.
Like the DB11, the DBS also benefits from a mechanical limitedslip differential at its driven rear axle, rather than the electronic apparatus in the more junior Vantage. Aston Martin has, however, increased the bias to help put all that muscle through a pair of 305/30 Pirelli P Zero tyres bespoke to the DBS. The track widths are also up by 10mm and 20mm at the front and rear
respectively, and so the DBS has a larger footprint than the equivalent DB11, even if it sits some 76kg lighter on the scales, at as little as 1799kg in running order (depending on lightweight options). Which may hardly seem ‘superlight’, especially given our test car still weighed 1910kg with a full tank. But remember how big a car this is, and the rich, luxury touring brief it serves. If anything promises to move such mass with urgency, it’s 664lb ft of torque.
In mechanical terms, the chassis is pure DB11, which is no bad thing. That means the DBS is built on the same aluminium platform and with a double-wishbone front- and multilink rear suspension design, each with coil springs, skyhook adaptive damping (changeable through GT, Sport and Sport Plus mode) and anti-roll bars front and rear.
Then there are the detail changes. The DBS is laterally stiffer, with only 2.6deg of roll per g compared with 3.0 for the DB11 (the Vantage is only 2.1). Those larger tyres, of course, offer up greater grip but the suspension is tuned for a progressive breakaway, Aston says, and the weighting of the electrically assisted steering has also been altered to suit this more sporting application – though, at 2.4 turns lock to lock, it’s no quicker than in the DB11.
INTERIOR
Your response to the DBS’S cabin design may well be defined by just how well acquainted you are with the wider Aston Martin model range. While there’s no questioning the material richness or luxurious ambience of the interior, customers upgrading from the DB11 will certainly notice the similarities between the two treatments.
Aside from our test car’s ‘triaxial’ diamond quilting (a £1995 option) and sportier seat design, the two cars are identical in terms of layout and primary componentry, which may come as a bit of a disappointment given the DB11 can be yours for some £80,000 less than our test subject.
The firm yet comfortably supportive seats position you low down in the cabin and, unlike in the 812 Superfast we road tested, are completely electronically adjustable. The steering column, meanwhile, also offers plenty of adjustability for rake and reach. Aside from a slight right-handed offset of that steering column, the DBS’S driving position is practically spot on – as it should be in a car pitched as an effortless intracontinental tourer.
Unlike the previous DBS – that of Bond-franchise fame – this latest
model retains its ‘occasional’ rear seats, although you’re unlikely to find that anyone bar small children will actually be able to use them. Isofix child-seat mounting points are present, so there’s the potential to squeeze a booster seat in the back – but actually doing so would only be possible by sacrificing a lot of space in the front.
The DBS’S boot is of a useful size, and certainly large enough for a few weekend bags, and maybe even a suitcase or two. The aperture itself is conveniently wide, but a touch on the narrow side. We don’t expect you would have any great problems loading the DBS with enough kit for a long-weekend sojourn to the south of France, though.
PERFORMANCE
Aston Martin hasn’t bothered with a labelled electronic launch control system for the DBS – and on a super-gt rather than a sports car, it would have been a discretionary inclusion anyway. But Gaydon has programmed a simple workaround into the electronic transmission safeguarding software that allows you to wind just the right amount of revs and torque into the DBS’S driveline for a perfect standing start, for a couple of seconds only, while holding the car stationary on the brakes. Really, it’s a de facto launch control system that doesn’t need a separate button or a complicated series of paddle flicks to activate. And it works well enough, without quite giving this car the off-the-line thrust some might expect of Aston’s most powerful series-production model.
Despite launching cleanly on full throttle and with strong enough traction on dry Tarmac, the DBS needs a tenth-of-a-second longer to hit 30mph from rest than the Aston Martin Vantage we tested earlier this year. It matches its smaller, lighter, cheaper sibling’s 0-60mph time to the tenth (3.7sec), and only then begins to assert its authority in the way you might expect it to, cracking 100mph from rest almost a full second sooner than the Vantage, and 150mph from rest a scarcely believable nine seconds sooner.
If the car had matched Gaydon’s 3.4sec 0-62mph claim, it probably wouldn’t have needed such prevailing speed to show what 700 horsepower can do for a modern front-engined Aston. And yet, judging by the standards of all supergts currently on the market save one, this is still an exceptionally fast car. That a Ferrari 812 Superfast is more than a second quicker to 100mph cannot go unmarked here – although the highly strung compromises the Italian imposes in order to deliver that dynamism will hardly need repeating to regular readers.
And yet in terms of in-gear roll-on acceleration of the sort that keen drivers commonly take an interest in when exploring the performance character of an A-list V12 engine in the real world, the boot’s on the other foot – because it’s often the DBS that would eke out an advantage over the 812. From 30-70mph in fourth gear, from 40-80mph in fifth and from 50-90mph in seventh, it’s the Brit that’s the faster-accelerating car of the two – and that’s in spite of also being the heavier of the two, and the more mechanically overdriven in its higher intermediate gears.
Unsurprisingly, then, it’s the sense of hugely muscular, accessible, effortless in-gear thrust that the DBS provides that appeals most about it when you’re bowling along out of town. The car’s transmission doesn’t always tap into that roll-on performance smoothly or to best effect, occasionally fumbling shifts in automatic mode to deliver them lazily or a touch clumsily.
But pick the ratios yourself, as you’ll probably be minded to anyway given there’s an engine of such outstanding breadth of potency at your command, and you’ll be amazed at how nonchalantly this big coupé picks up really big speed. It’s the sort of quality that befits a long-striding super-gt perfectly, but that few possess to such an abiding extent.
RIDE AND HANDLING
The DBS Superleggera has to get an awful lot right in this section to inspire the sort of confidence and assurance you need to really enjoy
a car of this size, bulk and effortless pace on the road. The perfect mixture of lateral grip, body control, steering response and handling agility, tempered against long-striding high-speed stability, ride compliance and grand touring comfort, isn’t an easy one to concoct. And, as both the Ferrari 812 Superfast and the Bentley Continental GT have already proven this year, even with the latest chassis and suspension technology it’s still easy to narrowly miss the super-gt class’s pimple-like dynamic bullseye to one side or the other.
But this time, Aston Martin hasn’t missed. The DBS Superleggera can satisfy the need, at times, to be supple-riding, easy-going and undemonstrative. Leave the car’s powertrain and suspension set to GT mode and its bump absorption is somewhere between that of a 12-cylinder DB11 and a Vantage. Its ride filters and isolates a little; feels fluent and breathes with longer-wave inputs; massages away the nastiest shorter and sharper edges without fussing; and yet keeps the Aston’s body flat and level, and always in close contact with the road. A fairly negligible bit of head toss, as the car’s laterally stiff rear axle deals with bigger inputs affecting one side of the axle or the other, is the closest the car ever gets to being uncomfortable.
From GT mode, you can ramp up the car’s dynamic temperament via Sport and Sport Plus now and again, as your mood takes you, trading ride compliance off against tauter vertical body control and slightly keener steering response – and dialling up the DBS’S dynamic character well into super-sports car territory, making it as compelling a driver’s car as most could ever want it to be. Though several testers said that they would seldom use the Sport Plus suspension settings on UK roads, most were glad of the option to.
And none had a bad word to say about the perfectly judged weight and pace of the car’s power steering, which communicates the cornering load going through the front tyres particularly well and never lets you feel anything other than intimately connected to the road.
BUYING AND OWNING
Next to what is arguably the DBS Superleggera’s closest rival – Ferrari’s hyper-focused 812 Superfast – Aston’s new flagship looks, on the face of things, like something of a value proposition. Strip away any options (an unlikely scenario in the real world) and the DBS is priced from £225,000 – some £38,000 less than the Ferrari.
Our experts predict that the 812 will prove to be more resistant to depreciation of the two, however – albeit only initially, only in percentage terms and only by the narrowest of margins. Over the course of a three-year ownership period and 36,000 miles travelled (your average DBS owner will likely do far less in that time, mind), the Aston is expected to retain 56% of its original value, versus 60% for the Ferrari. After a more typical pattern of super-gt usage – at three years old and with 15,000 miles on the clock – CAP expects the DBS to retain 63% of its original value.
But then big, exotic V12 coupés have never been as canny a buy as Gt3-badged Porsches – and yet their owners have so far chosen to indulge them anyway.
You’ll be amazed at how nonchalantly it picks up really big speed