Thank Frankel it's Friday: The big, bright future of Aston Martin

Currently there are three distinct model lines – the Vantage two seat sports car, the DB11 GT car and the DBS supercar. All sit on different iterations of the same architecture and are powered by either a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 supplied by Mercedes-AMG, or a twin-turbo 5.2-litre V12 built by Aston Martin. In time all will be available in convertible form too. So that’s all very easy.

Where it gets a little complex is when we start to consider the stuff you can’t buy yet. One of these cars, the Valkyrie, you can’t buy because even at £2 million they were all sold almost immediately. I think the Valkyrie will be a once in a lifetime car, the McLaren F1 of its day, and with Adrian Newey behind its design I fully expect it to shift the barriers of road car performance further than any car in at least the last 25 years. My only concern is the tyres – can a street legal tyre really develop grip commensurate with that level of performance? We will see, but when I drove the McLaren Senna its tyres felt like the cork in the bottle of its performance, and the Valkyrie is going to be another world faster than that.

Curiously the car known internally as ‘son of Valkyrie’ has already been confirmed and a teaser image released ahead of its appearance at the Geneva Motor Show in ten days time. Called ‘003’ at present it will borrow heavily from the aerodynamic and active suspension technology of the Valkyrie, but come with a downsized turbo, hybrid engine. Likely to cost half the Valkyrie’s money, Aston Martin aims to build 400 of them.

Why? Partly because such cars make money, but mainly because Valkyrie, 003 and even Aston Martin’s sponsorship of the Red Bull F1 team are all part of a single strategy: to establish Aston Martin as a credible player among mid-engined sports cars before the release of the really important car: the standard production mid-engined machine designed to rival the Ferrari 488GTB and McLaren 720S. We know little about the car at present though it would be fair to speculate it will be hybrid driven. Aston Martin has also yet to find a new home for its Vanquish nameplate and this would be as logical a place as any for it to reside.

But it’s not done yet. Not nearly in fact. The most important car in Aston Martin’s future is the DBX SUV which we’ll see late this year. If the lightly disguised prototypes we’ve seen so far are any guide, it will likely be the best looking car in its class and it is the company’s hope that its sales will match those of all other Aston Martins combined. Cars will be built in the company’s second factory at St Athan in Glamorganshire and start to reach customers next year.

Nor is this the end of Aston’s ambitions, because there is the relaunched Lagonda brand to consider. The plan for Lagonda is to aim straight between the eyes of Rolls Royce with a range of post-modern, all electric super luxury cars, launching first with a saloon then an SUV. All Lagondas will be built in St Athan using adapted versions of the platform already developed for the DBX and having stunned the Geneva motorshow with a concept of the saloon last year, Lagonda will be doing the same with the SUV this year.

And relax? Well not quite. Because Aston Martin is also committed to producing a heritage model every year, like the continuation run of DB4 GTs it is already building. What will 2019’s model be? Sixty years after Aston Martin won Le Mans and the World Sports Car championship, you’d be brave to bet against a very small number of DBR1s being built at Aston Martin Works in Newport Pagnell.

That really is it, at least as far as cars go. But Aston Martin doesn’t want you to see it as just a sports, super or GT car manufacturer. It would instead be delighted if you saw it as a luxury brand, as you might Louis Vuitton, which is why it has formed partnerships to create boats, aircraft, apartments and even a submersible. In short, if Aston Martin boss Andy Palmer’s vision continues to be realised in full, there will shortly be an Aston product to suit the needs and desires of the world’s wealthiest people, whether that be on land, sea, under the sea or in the air.