Sturm und Drang
More extreme, harder work and more visceral than the stock, auto-only Vantage, the AMR – with its manual ’box – promises to hit higher emotional highs. Can it deliver?
Porsche’s Cayman GT4? You could have two for the same money
Aspin around the medieval town of Nürburg without taking a spin round the ’Ring that defines it sounds as pointless as a pilgrimage to Oktoberfest while observing Stoptober. It’s not a deliberate tease on Aston Martin’s part. We’re here simply because it’s convenient for Aston to base the drive event of its new Vantage AMR at its Nürburgring test centre. We won’t be scaring ourselves witless on the run down to the Fuchsröhre, or piling the uprated two-seater into the Karussell’s crazy camber.
But maybe there’s a subliminal message, too. The AMR is Aston’s first crack at a more focused Vantage, and the third AMR (Aston Martin Racing) road car after the Rapide and DB11. What it is not, Aston assures us, is some kind of British-built, front-engined Porsche 911 GT3 RS.
Presumably that’ll come later, but for now what we have here is a Vantage that’s 95kg lighter and a little sharper. A friend on track, sure, but fettled for the road. The main point of differentiation is that it comes exclusively with a manual gearbox, rather than the eight-speed ZF automatic found in the standard car. You can’t have an AMR with an auto, and you can’t yet get a standard Vantage with the manual, though you will be able to next year.
Only 200 AMRs will be built; 59 of those will wear special Vantage 59 trim combining Stirling Green and Lime to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Aston’s famous Le Mans victory. The remaining 141 customers get a choice of black, grey, white or the Sabiro Blue of our car that probably looks great in Palm Springs but is as dreary as the weather on a damp, foggy October day in Germany.
The murky weather at 8am doesn’t do the paint any favours, but it’s not so pea-soupy that I can’t make out the standard-fit carbon-ceramic brakes, another key bit of AMR kit, and one that helps lift the price to £149,995. That’s £29k more than Aston wants for the standard car (and there’s a further £15,000 to add to that if you want the 59 edition), and a few quid more than a much faster 911 Turbo. Cayman GT4? You could have two for the same money as one AMR, presuming you had the incriminating snaps of your Porsche dealer required to get your name on the list. This gearbox had better be good.
We’ve seen it before in the previous-shape, V12-powered Vantage S. It’s essentially a manual version of the now-dead (and not missed) Sportshift II paddleshift gearbox. There are seven gears, which is lots, but that doesn’t make it unique. Porsche 911s have had seven-speeders, too. What is unique is the layout: first is on a dogleg, back and to the left, with reverse above it. The remaining six forward ratios are located in a conventional H-pattern. It’s a nod to historic racing cars, in which first gear was generally only used for getting off the line, and was a staple of Italian supercars up until the mid ’90s when even the Italians finally realised that first gear is pretty useful in a road car.
Push the starter button and tickle the right pedal. The V8 in the previous Vantage always revved like it had a bank-vault door for a flywheel. But this one picks up and sheds revs ⊲
nd
much more easily. Good start. Remember, we’re not just discovering how an Aston Vantage feels with a manual transmission for the first time, but how this 4.0-litre turbocharged Mercedes engine does, too. It’s lifted from the AMG C63, and is also used in Benz’s AMG GT, but neither car offers a manual option.
The transmission sounds alarmingly rattly at idle, like it’s fitted with a single-mass flywheel, though it isn’t. Slotting first gear requires a deliberate push across the gate and a weird diagonal movement back towards the centre of the car, but the clutch is light, and the take-up smooth.
But not as smooth as the roads heading away from Nürburg to the Belgian border. Wide, flat and glistening in the rain, they give absolutely no clue to ride comfort but a big one to how impressively the front Pirellis hold on in terrible conditions. The electric steering still can’t match the hydraulic set-up in the old Vantage for feedback, but the response is clean and instant, giving the car a pointiness absent in its bigger, similarly front-engined, rear-drive stablemates, with their longer wheelbases. (The Aston’s longer between its axles than rivals like the R8 Audi or Porsche’s 911.) You need faith in the car in these conditions, and at least the Vantage’s front end does nothing to prompt undue worry, even as the rain hammers down.
And the back? The rear tyres break away promptly in the wet, and do so with surprisingly little provocation. The ESP mops up any yaw but responds in a fairly leisurely manner. I wonder if the switch from the standard car’s active rear differential – usually a handy tool with which chassis engineers can tune out understeer – to the lighter option of a traditional mechanical limited-slip differential is a factor here. Perhaps the stiffer rear anti-roll bar Aston has fitted to help the car turn is also responsible for its lively rear end, certainly in this weather.
Two hours in and I’m still getting to grips with the gearshift. I haven’t got a problem with the dogleg layout. I’ve owned a couple of old BMW M cars with that pattern and driven plenty of supercars with the same, so it doesn’t take long to adapt. But the pronounced springing towards the fourth- and fifth-gear plane means you can easily wrong-slot unless you’re giving it plenty of attention.
Fortunately the Merc motor is so gutsy, you can style-out any fluffed shift and kid your passenger you really did mean to go from first to fourth. And that’s despite the wick being turned down 44lb ft to 461lb ft because this ’box isn’t as stout as the ZF auto. Even factoring the lower weight, the AMR is slower, taking 4.0 seconds to reach 62mph instead of 3.6, although it still feels usefully rapid, if way off 911 Turbo S rapid. Vantage and AMR share the same 503bhp rating and 195mph top speed.
But we can forget about silly top speeds now. A slightly battered sign emblazoned with the European flag signals that we’ve crossed the border from Germany to Belgium. We didn’t need a sign to tell us. The change in road surface is comical: granite smooth on the German side, and, on the other, littered with potentially tyre-killing potholes and covered in more patches than a 60-a-day smoker on a flight to Australia. Fortunately, with a quick tap of the steering-wheel button to select the softest of the dampers’ three settings (though even that’s called Sport) down from Sport Plus, which Germany’s smooth roads tolerate, the Vantage strolls on without fuss. ‘I don’t like stiff road cars,’ chief engineer Matt Becker had told me earlier. Me neither.
Watching the testing racers push through Eau Rouge at the Spa Francorchamps circuit, which predates the Nürburgring by five years, we’re reminded that there are times when you might want an extra dose of stiff. The AMR’s Track mode should cater for that, though despite our pleading with the man on the gate, it’s clear we’re not going to be able to sneak on the track today to find out.
So we point the car back to the ’Ring, in search of a nice empty autobahn to satisfy our thirst for speed. Frustratingly, the smooth, lightly populated dual carriageway leading to the border turns into a busy single-carriageway road the instant ⊲
Perhaps the sti er rear anti-roll bar Aston’s fitted to help the car turn is also responsible for its lively rear end
we cross into Germany, but later we do get the chance to open it up. We brush 300km/h (186mph) fairly effortlessly, on the way there using the rev-matching tech that also enables you to shift gears with your right foot still partially, or even fully, on the throttle. The AMR feels absolutely composed at this kind of speed, and when we dial the pace back to 100mph it cruises surprisingly quietly. This might be the sportiest Vantage, but you could still take it anywhere, any time.
Back at Nürburg that evening we take the customary trip to the dungeon-like Pistenklause restaurant. The air’s thick like the toilets at Heathrow before an 8am flight, though mercifully less pungent. Dozens of steaks are being served, each on a diner’s personal hot stone, allowing you to cook the cow to your tastes. I’ve done it a couple of times before and it’s definitely fun but tonight I can’t be bothered to fiddle. I’m starving and just want to eat. Aston’s Matt Becker does too, and suggests a pre-prep fillet.
The dishes arrive at the same time, but while the hot-stone end of the table sits diligently slicing bits from their steak, cooking each morsel individually, I’m already halfway through mine. It doesn’t taste any worse because I left the cooking up to someone who knows what they’re doing.
Neither is better, they’re just different. You can see where I’m going with this. The AMR is slower, less refined, and requires more effort. Most Vantage buyers won’t see the point. But for a select group, that’s exactly the point. The AMR asks more and expects more from you. More gratification; less instant. Six months into the ownership experience you’d still be perfecting that awkward gearchange and switching the rev-matching software off to try for the perfect downshift.
But an additional £30k for the privilege? The AMR is great fun but we’d pocket the cash and take the brilliant standard Vantage, automatic and all. Or sit tight and wait a year for its no-cost-option manual alter ego.
This might be the sportiest Vantage, but you could still take it anywhere, any time
Di -erent strokes
The AMR’s simpler traditional mechanical limited-slip di erential promises a more analogue driving experience than the regular Vantage with the electronically controlled di , and further contributes to the AMR’s overall 95kg weight saving. But the real reason it’s there is that tuning a car with an e-LSD takes up much more development time, and Aston Martin couldn’t justify it on a tiny 200-unit production run.
Back-seat driver
When Aston’s chief engineer Matt Becker was at Lotus, Toyota supplied engines, Lotus fitted them, even adding forced induction, and the Japanese giant never raised an eyebrow. Things are di erent between Aston and Benz. Mercedes insisted on testing and approving the installation of its 4.0-litre V8 in the Vantage. Having tried the AMR has it expressed any interest in creating a manual AMG GT? Sadly not.
’Box ticking?
We love manual transmissions, and we love the idea of a manual Vantage, but this isn’t the perfect marriage. There’s a surprising amount of transmission chatter at idle, and while you quickly acclimatise to the gimmicky dogleg layout, the narrow gates and way the lever is sprung mean it’s too easy to wrong-slot. You certainly can’t accuse it of not being involving…