You can buy the Aston Martin F1 safety car

Sportscar marketing opportunities come rarely better than being the official safety (pace) car of motorsport’s top tier. Seeing a fast road car doing its utmost not to slow down too much a pack of howling F1 machines has always made an interesting sight.

Mercedes has provided all F1’s safety cars since 1996 but now it has relinquished its grip on the role and passed the baton, and the high profile that comes with it, to Aston for the first time – quite right too in a year that marks the British firm’s return to F1 after 60 years with the AMR21. Aston has wasted no time in showing the green lights to a special edition version.

So get your own personal pitlane ready for the Vantage F1 Edition. Yes, it really is the F1 safety car for the road, complete with 0-62mph in 3.6 seconds and a top speed of 195mph in coupe form. Aston says the two machines were developed from the start as track-focused but road-legal cars – even the actual safety car runs on road rubber. It’s all the doing of new Aston chief, and ex-AMG boss, Tobias Moers. It could be said the F1 Edition is Tobias’s first Aston.

Mirroring the safety car, the F1 Edition gets essentially an identical package of engine, chassis and aerodynamic upgrades. The Vantage’s 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 engine gets a 25PS (18kW) hike to 535PS (393kW), making it the most powerful model in the Vantage range. Torque remains the same at 685Nm (507lb ft) but tweaks to its delivery and to the eight-speed automatic transmission mean faster upshifts.

Underneath are mods to make the structure stiffer and the steering more communicative, along with upgraded dampers, increased rate springs and, for the first time on a Vantage, 21-inch wheels. Like the safety car, they are shod with Pirelli P Zeros. The body is unchanged apart from an aero kit of full-width front splitter, front dive planes, underbody turning vanes, and – most noticeably – the new rear wing. Together they amount to 200kg more downforce at top speed.

Aston says it all adds up to significant performance enhancements and improved lap times “without compromising its on-road capabilities”. Aston chief executive Tobias Moers tells us: “I was insistent that gains in performance came via genuine improvements in the car’s dynamics, and not by fitting track-optimised tyres. The results speak for themselves.”

You can get the Vantage F1 Edition as either coupe or convertible and with a range of colour palettes and trim options, including a green one with lime green flashes inside as a nod to the racing cars. Other colours are black and white in either matte or gloss finishes, both with grey racing graphics. Black leather and grey Alcantara is the order of the day in the cabin, along with contrasting stripes and stitching.

The F1 Edition isn’t a limited edition and prices start from £142,000. It’s available to order now with first deliveries in May.

“Performance is at the heart of every Aston Martin, but when it wears an F1 badge it has to be a truly exceptional car,” Moers adds. “It’s a true athlete: more powerful, more agile, more immediate and more exciting to drive. And – of course – quicker and more capable in a race-track environment.”

And next up from Aston? That will surely have to be a DBX F1 Medical Car special edition won’t it?