If the new Vantage looks distinctly familiar, that’s because sketches of the car were hanging on the walls of Aston’s offices the day that Spectre producers Sam Mendes and Barbara Broccoli came to talk about the DB10 for the movie. They took one look at the burgeoning Vantage and said they wanted it, so Aston duly made a special version based on it.
The true genius behind this new front-mid-engined, 4.0-litre, twin-turbocharged V8 sports car, which takes the engine from the V8 DB11, is Aston’s unassuming magician-in-chief, Matt Becker. Formerly chief engineer at Lotus, his handprints are all over the new Vantage and it’s a work of engineering art. Where the old Vantage had front and rear lift, the new Vantage has half the front lift and a shedload of rear downforce. The driver sits around the central pivot, or yaw, point of the car which now has an electronic differential that is linked to the electronic stability control system. It’s more sensitive to changes of direction and traction, so can offer far more nuanced solutions, as well as going from fully open to fully-locked in milliseconds, unlike a standard limited slip diff.
This is also the lowest nose on any Aston, with a front splitter below that, and yet piloting it along Portuguese roads, with severe undulations, it never scraped its aero-diffused bottom lip on anything – thank the American market for that, where noses have to be high enough to miss vicious multi-storey ramps.
It’s not just the outside of the car which has been refined: thankfully the inside is far less riotous than the DB11, with matching colours, textures and tones instead of a clash of materials and patterns. If you want to be lairy, you can always specify a lime-green front splitter and grill surround, or lime-green accents on the doors and round the automatic gear buttons that control the eight-speed ZF box (a manual will be offered in due course). You can have forged wheels or standard steel, and twin exhausts or quad pipes.