This, as you know, is the new Aston Martin Vantage, we're going to do a couple of simple
things right, I'm going to go for a drive on the track and then talk you through a cutaway
of the chassis because it's really, really interesting indeed, don't miss that and
3, we're going to go for a drive on the road and see exactly how good this new sports
car is.
Right, welcome then to the inside of the new Aston Martin Vantage and this one is in quite
a racy trim.
Now there will be differences between road and track versions that you see in this film
for complicated reasons that they don't want us using the same car on road and track.
This one is on lightweight forged wheels which save about 10kg all round, it's on carbon
ceramic discs which save another 24kg all round so I think these seats are optional,
this alcantara's certainly optional too.
All in then with those weight saving bits in place, you're looking at a car which
is 1530 kg dry, add another 100kg to that for a wet weight so it is probably not
as light as some of the stuff around it, 911s particularly.
First impressions, well they've turned up the V8 engine, it's in the same tune it
is in the DB11 V8, so it's about 500 horsepower.
Maximum torque about the same in lbs-ft comes in at 2000 rpm and then the torque curve is
dead flat from there but they have turned up the noise and I can turn it up even further
with 3 drive modes.
Now in the DB11 you get GT, Sport, Sport Plus, I think they've moved them a stage further,
more sporty if you like from there, so my standard one is sport but I can make the powertrain
Sport+ which turns things up a bit or I can put it in track which turns the exhaust up
again, sounds quite good doesn't it?
The DB11 doesn't sound that V8-y but this actually kind of does, they've turned it
up.
You can switch chassis modes too obviously, so there's normal mode or you can put it
in sport and you can put it in sport+.
We're at Portimao in Portugal, which is a circuit with a few lumps and bumps on it, and the maximum
maximum suspension setting Aston's engineers say is probably too harsh for this so it needs
a really smooth track like Silverstone or something like that.
So I am going to put it in, I've got the sort of plus on the suspension, track on the
drivetrain and what I can tell you straight away is that it feels impressively stable,
it's a front engined car don't forget.
Gearbox is responsive, steering has two weights, this is the firmer of them,
but it's still not heavy, it's heavier than a Ferrari, probably not as heavy as a
GT3 Porsche or something like that.
You can just feel there traction control in its full on state is quite hard, it doesn't
let you play around too much so it takes two pushes because it's a Mercedes derived system
and now that's in ESP track as we just arrive at a second gear hairpin which is handy.
So it allows a little bit more slip, the engine revs to 7,000 and stays there when you're
in full manual mode until you change up and another long push takes everything into off
and at that point Aston says everything is off, conveniently there is another hairpin.
What I love about front-engined rear-wheel-drive cars is that they just have a beautiful benign
handling balance to them that is just honest, it's straightforward and great fun and loveable
and when it's got this much power, this much torque, mechanical layout I will talk
you through it in a minute.
Oh god that is so nice, engineers at Aston they just like doing this sort of thing and
they are aware of how much fun it is and if you make a great handling
car in its extremes, you end up with a good handling car, a rewarding car all the time.
In addition to the differential it also has torque vectoring via braking so on turn in
it will ease in say an inside rear wheel to just try and help the turn in and it feels like
the point of rotation is right about here.
You sit in the middle, the weight distribution is balanced, you get all of those things right
and I mean about half the battle is won into making a great handling car and the rest of
it is all in brilliant tuning, they've got some gifted people doing that sort of thing.
Now techy bit, I don't quite understand this yet but I'm getting there, it's not
just what the front wheels do that make a car really nicely balanced if it's good
like this, what matters is the lateral stiffness at the back.
If you stand at the back of the car and you push it sideways, forget about roll, if you
were to try push it sideways, it helps if it's very rigid because then the front just
goes where you want and then the back is very well supported against lateral loads.
This has got a rigidly mounted rear subframe, rear subframe is for the most part shared
with the DB11 but that is mounted squishily to give more on road GT-ness, this would allow
more road noise and lack of refinement because it's rigidly mounted but what it gives is
that lateral stiffness that makes this car so enjoyable and playful.
Oh god, it's just ridiculous, it's just ridiculously easy to do that, that's absurd,
that is absurd, what a car, in a way it reminds me in the way it wants to play is like a,
and I use this as a compliment, a bit like a Ferrari 458/488, they've got that really
nice lateral grippiness at the rear, there's a real honesty to it, a real willingness to
do exactly what you want, it's quick, I'm getting enough back through the steering,
I'm getting loads back through the chassis, as a track car it's really good fun, you
can drive it too in a sort of fast way if you want to and what's nice about it is
you get to a corner and you can choose your angle exactly how you want, if you want to
drive it racily with sort of neutral steer or a tiny bit of lock or a tiny dab the other
way then it'll do it and if you want to be a total hooligan, it will do that too.
Okay now here comes what Jennifer Aniston used to call the science bit.
This is then the bare chassis of the new Vantage, ostensibly it's the same architecture as
the DB11 but actually only 30% of the components are shared between the two and now I have
a sheet because I've got quite a lot of notes here.
The wheelbase is 100 mm shorter than the DB11 and that makes the overall length of the car
about the same size as a Porsche 911 in length.
Now it doesn't look like it, it looks like it's slightly longer and that's because
what the engineers call the 'colouring in department' have made it very sleek and
very elegant.
Now it's an all aluminium structure, the nice thing about aluminium is that for a specific
weight it is very stiff, stiffer than steel, but it tends to use more material doing it,
slightly complicated but anyway it does.
The good thing about the new architecture is there are more castings and there are more
forgings and there are slightly less extrusions so it is more space efficient than the old
Aston VH architecture, that means two things, 1.
You can make the car feel a bit different inside from one to the other, old Astons used
to feel a bit similar and look a bit similar, this time the DB11 will be very different
to Vantage, will be very different to Vanquish, so on and so forth.
Now, the other thing about aluminium is because you have to use a little bit more material,
this ends up being quite a wide car, it's wider than a 911 for example but if you think
about other all aluminium cars like the Jaguar F-type and the Mercedes AMG GT, they're
also quite wide, probably the only aluminium structured car that isn't wide is maybe
a Lotus Elise and Evora, they've got all the strength in the sills so they're very
different to get in and out of and they don't have to worry about a transmission tunnel
down the middle which this car does, other front engined cars do which is where quite
a lot of the strength is in this.
Now, that brings me to the powertrain, the engine is in the front but if you look here,
the entire block sits behind the front axle line then the propshaft runs at engine speed
all the way through to the rear axle where there is a ZF automatic 8-speed transmission,
now that's not a twin clutch because actually modern torque convertor autos hook up, they
lock up really quickly, you don't get much benefit from a twin clutch and a conventional
auto is more refined.
Also at the back, and this is new to this car is an e-differential, now that is a limited
slip differential which is electronically controlled which means it can do all that
a mechanical limited slip diff does, so it can slide as you will have already seen, but
it also means that it can unlock very easily so when manoeuvring or when you're just on the
road and you want an ultra agile feel, there is no locking to that differential.
Finally then, all of that together means that the weight distribution is pretty much bang
on 50/50 because there is so much weight at the back of the car to counteract the fact
that the engine is at the front and that is why it feels so well balanced and so agile
on a circuit, so let's go and find out what it is like on the road.
So then, to the road driving impressions of the new Vantage, different Vantage you might notice, leathery
interior rather than the alcantara sporty one, this is a sort of more luxo spec, so
we don't ruin them all on the track I suppose.
This one has not got the lightweight wheels, the unsprung mass presumably would help improve
the ride even further but the ride is pretty good, I'm in the most leisurely of every
mode at the moment so I'm in sport on the powertrain, I'm in normal on the suspension,
if I go into sport+ or track on the suspension that introduces heavier steering weight too,
the steering weight is quite good as it is, the ride is fine as it is, sport+ you can use
on the road, track just gets way too much for the road.
The powertrain modes are a bit more usable all round, what they tend to do, they give
you a little bit of extra response but the big difference is on the waffle of the exhaust
and the reactions of the automatic gearbox but to be honest, so easy is it to go in and
out of manual mode, between automatic and manual mode on that gearbox, you just pull
a paddle and these are the best paddles in the business bar Ferrari I would say, mounted
to the column rather than the wheel, I can see the argument either way on that.
Anything more than a quarter turn then having them on the column because at least you know
exactly where they are all the time and these are big paddles, they've got an easy pull
to them and if you give an extended pull on the right, you go straight back into automatic
mode which is great, you don't have to faff around with anything down here and I really
like that about Astons and the other few cars, not as many do it as you'd think.
You know I mentioned it's a wide car, it feels its width on the road actually.
If you were to come straight from a 911 into this you might think wow this is actually
quite a large car, you can't see any of the bonnet, got a very high window line, visibility
out the back is not bad, there's a hatchback at the back, that gives it a fairly sizeable
boot, actually there's quite a lot of storage space behind these seats which have also got
a lot of room, so it feels like quite a spacious car.
If you're looking for a tiny, nimble, agile feeling sports car, I don't think this is
the one.
I mean I say that, it's agile in its own way, it's just not little, what gives it
what agility it has is that it has a perfect weight distribution and it feels like it pivots
right around here and even on the road you kind of get that impression of a quick direction
change where the steering response is really good, it's quick enough, it's got the
same ratio as the DB11 but because it's got a shorter wheelbase, effectively the steering
is quicker, gearbox response is really good, it does make a good noise, it does make a
good noise.
Thats is in standard mode as well, I like the fact that they've really turned the
wick back up on the engine note and the exhaust note over the DB11, whose V8 arguably sounds
quite flat, this V8 sounds proper and if I switch it back into sport +, track mode then
the exhaust goes up another notch.
Hehe!
Or you can turn it back down, and an extended push on the start button, this is good when
you start it, starts it in quiet mode so you don't irritate all of your neighbours.
Not that at £120,000+ this is the kind of car whose owners are likely to have neighbours
in close proximity.
It's a lot of money isn't it £120,000 and that is more than most of the competition,
gets you a really good 911 at £120,000 so you get some serious kit but it is a seriously
good car.
What's it like in terms of interior fit and finish and refinement?
Some of the plastics are merely okay, the leather and stitching is generally very good
actually, there's the occasional bit where you can just sort of see a little pull on
the leather, that might be because this is an early car, there's also a bit down here
that I can sort of pull around far too easily but generally this car feels special, it feels
a little bit handmade, by which I mean crafted, not botched together, it feels a little
bit crafted but it also feels like it is the product of a proper company, you know, somebody
that does things well.
I like this car, I like this car very much.
Do I like it more than a Porsche 911 GTS?
There are elements of it that I do, I love its natural handling balance, I love its track
handling balance where you can just play with it front to rear, I love the engine note,
I think ultimately I might love a 911 GTS a tiny bit more but the fact that we're
merely having this conversation and comparing one against the other and saying well this
outdoes that there but that outdoes that there, shows just how far and just how good a job
Aston Martin has done with the new Vantage.
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