FIRST DRIVE Aston Martin Vanquish 824bhp And Looks To Die For

This is Aston Martin's most powerful road car ever. It's got 824 brake horsepower, 738 pounds feet of torque and it will do 214 miles an hour top speed. It'll get from zero to 62 miles an hour in just 3.2 seconds. And yet here we are having a perfectly normal conversation and my eyes aren't rattling, my ears aren't bleeding and my spine's not trying to punch its way through the roof of my mouth. And yet if I tweak this dial two clicks to the right and press the accelerator slightly more than is necessary, I remember what this car is called and why it's a legend. This is the Aston Martin Vanquish. Are you going for a drive dear? No, I'm going out to vanquish things. I know the Valkyrie has more power but it's a limited production track car with some number plates bolted to it. This is the Vanquish, a proper car. So there you have it, it's a GT car that can be quiet, restrained and pretty refined and then go out and beat up a supercar. It's a hyper GT. Just look at this profile, it absolutely screams front-engined rear-wheel drive, what my pops would call a proper car. And it doesn't matter how cute your details are, if you haven't got that kind of immediate impact. But the Vanquish does have that immediacy and it also has the details. For instance, it's got 80 millimetres extra in the wheelbase between the windscreen and the front axle, which gives it this chonky bonnet, super choppy cam tail. Massive grill, 13% bigger than the DBS Ultimate to feed the engine, new channels to cool the brakes, matrix LED headlights like the Vantage, bonnet vents to exhaust what needs exhausting, Aston side strakes with that badge, 21-inch wheels, big swoops of bodywork and that chopped-off tail. Then there are these, rear lights as little 3D keys like the Valkyrie and this big panel here, which Aston calls the shield, which you can have in various shades of carbon fibre or body colour. It's not actually that groundbreaking in terms of form, but I'll tell you one thing, every time I've parked it and look back, I've not been disappointed. And that's down to a team of designers led by one man, who just happens to be wandering around a wet Sardinian hillside looking for a posh Uber. Ready to go for a drive? I was thinking about this, like Vanquish when I drove it was 460 horsepower, right? Vanquish S was a little bit more, I think it was like 520, something like that. But then this is 820, so compared to the original Vanquish, it's like this is the right two fingers up at the physics of it. So this is when you put your foot down, you are paying attention. You've got to hang on to it a little bit, but also that's one of the things that I've been getting used to is that we're in GT mode now, right? And we're toddling along and we're having a perfectly normal conversation, no raised voices. This is quite a bobbly road and it works. So it's a proper GT. And then the scary part is available, but not always necessary. What I wanted to know was, you get handed designing the new Vanquish, right? Is that exciting or is that scary? Because it's got a weight behind it. Equal measures. When you start a car project, it's quite nice to know what it's going to be called. It's not always the case that you know what it's going to be called, but actually it really affects how you go about it. And it affects, as you say, the pressure that you put on yourself. And I think it's equal parts excitement and pressure. End of the day, Ian Callum did a very, very good job with the original Vanquish. So you know it. It was a poster on my wall as a kid. Was it really? Yeah. So you know that it's in the back of your mind, but it's that thing. It's like the racing driver going out, you're not going out to come last. You're going out there with the hope to win. So it's the same thing. The name's cool, but I'm going out there to make a really, really good one. Yeah. So what did Vanquish mean to you then? What is a Vanquish supposed to make you feel? Thunderous. That sounds like something medical. Yeah, a little bit. No, but thunderous. So it should feel like the punch. Right. It's an absolute punch. And it's an athlete. It's live. You know, you look at Ian's car, you go back to it now, and you look at this, there is muscle, there's sculpture, it's tense, but it's probably a boxer. It's not a 100 metre runner, yeah? It's got some mass behind it. It's not a mid-engine car. It's not like to the bone. It has shoulders on it. It walks in the room and talks, and it's got a bass to its voice. Yeah. It's all those sort of things. And that's what Ian's car has for me. And it's what this has. And it's, you know, it's got that sense of movement that pushes the proportion of this and got the nose forward. So it's really like a punch immediately. It's viscerally kind of front-engine rear-wheel drive. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's got that. Unapologetic. So explain to me why, as I've got older, I've decided... Go on. That, like... It's a personal thing. This has got nothing to do with Astons in particular. But it's like I've decided that big wings and mid-engines and all of that kind of stuff isn't cool. So why do I... Because it could be to do with the stuff that I liked as a kid, and I'm coming back to it. But why do I think front-engined, cam-tailed, short-bummed, big cars like this are super cool? And mid-engine cars with lots of wings, I don't like anymore. There is. You see these and there's something very classy about them. You can pull up outside a restaurant in one of these and in a mid-engine car. You know, there could be this analogy with rocking up wearing too much sportswear. So track suits. Track suits and suits. Yeah, it's that. But there's also that middle ground. But I don't know why that comes with age. My son sends me pictures of Mansory... With a lot of things. Things on it. They have a lot of addenda and it just drives me insane. It's a lot of excitement. But maybe when you get older, you realise actually to save in things and actually things in moderation are beautiful. And I heard it from my parents and I start to get like, you know, you go to London, there's too many people. There's too much going on. But it's the same with design. With a lot of the mid-engine ones, they're all about excitement. And that's great. And that can fit a certain customer. But there's another customer who wants that. They want it distilled. They want to be able to take a step back and enjoy it. I mean, with the designers, what we talk about a lot, Aston, is we talk about actors in a film. Now, if you've got too many main actors, the film becomes incoherent because they're all fighting for attention. Yeah. So we talk about lead actor and supporting actors, but we talk about it as elements in design. A lot of what our cars are about is just tempering that to get that confidence. It's the pause in a song, that confident pause in a song. Yeah. Where there's nothing and then it goes again. Or the short sentence at the end of a novel that really hits. Yeah. But like, was there a bit that you designed it and thought, or somebody brought you and you just thought, that really nails it? The rear end on this was the bit that... We did that quite late in the program, cause an absolute sting. Now, does it look a bit weird with body colour? Because I've not seen one with body colour yet. I need to go on the configurator, don't I? No, I mean, but you can do what you want with it. So I actually put it on my Instagram. I actually said, right, what does everyone like? Carbon, body colour or contrast? And what did they say? But actually, the carbon was quite popular. But when I started 16 years ago, you'd go down the line and you'd see a few adventurous cars. Yeah. And you'd be like, oh. And then you realise, over years and years and years and dealing with lots of customers and what they want and how they think, you realise it's absolutely wonderful that they want to do something a little bit bonkers. It's wonderful because they've engaged with the brand. They're expressing themselves. They're making this, you know, they're living their best life with this car. So you don't have the taste police? You don't go in and go... No, we actually, we really don't. Ever so often, the reality is most of the time, they ask for our guidance. So very naturally, you can shape something with this. But I think that we're a bit unique in the Britishness of our brand. You know, you think of some of the fashion houses, the slightly eccentric nature of British design. Yeah. Whereby, purple and yellow, sir. Absolutely, let's go for it. Let's make it that McQueen vibe. I think British design has a bit of that. It's funny because we allow it, but yet we still have this perception of absolute taste in our cars. But actually, of the supercar makers, we're very, very free and approachable in the way we do bespoke. I still think it'd be great if someone orders something absolutely horrific and you just phone them up and go, right, listen, green and yellow, we're not having it. You need to... I'm the design director. Are you hemmed by the traditions of Vanquish or did you get a lot of freedom to express yourself? So I think the way a designer's brain works, though, is that that hemmed in is what generates new ideas. So it's the pressure that makes the design. Yeah, often it's the pressure because it's the necessity, mother of invention. So you actually find stuff because you're like, I'm trying not to swear on there. You're like, oh dear, how am I going to do this? It's really like that thing. So you're like, how are we going to make this car? How's, you know, if I bump into Ian, is he going to say, nice job? How do you know that something you do won't fall massively out of fashion? In terms of future proofing, it's that same thing. It's like you push the guys to break the rules and not do the brief because in doing that, you sort of find the next steps. We often do things like, imagine you're doing the concept car to replace the next production car. So again, you're trying to break them out of there. Push forward all the time. Yeah. How do you maintain the energy for being a designer? I guess that you've got to have it in your veins. You've got to have, you've got to be a little bit mad because you've got to fight people on what is almost always an emotional argument when you exist in a logical economic world. And you've got to be willing to go in and fight passionately for something that actually might take you months to explain to everyone else why it's absolutely necessary. Why wheel to body matters and what difference it actually makes because people will look at the car and go, I like that car and they don't understand why. It's interesting because I actually compare it to music sometimes. So love listening to music, love the mood it creates often affects what you do and what you design. But I can't write music. I can't describe how it's all put together but you know when you've got a great piece of music, you'll go, that's a great piece of music. But it's often what drives designers. And with the team, because it is a team effort, the team will push them in different directions. So we'll purposely sort of, so Vanquish, we know we're going to go and design a Vanquish but within that we'll push them to do something slightly different because you naturally can become almost claustrophobic about the fact that you've got to replace a legendary car. And by actually going to them, well, why don't you design a car inspired by the DP214 of the 1960s? Okay, yeah, make it more muscular. You actually, a lot of the time what you do is send them in slightly different directions to generate the idea. And then mirror it back. So you let people go nutso. One thing with our design team, and it's why we keep people a long time, is we're after their unleashed character when they draw and when they pen something. We want that to come out in spades and then we can temper it. But tempering is a good word, isn't it? So it gets to be this explosive sort of colourful, you know, drug-induced fantasy. You're searching for, I mean half the time you're basically searching for the thing you don't know about yet. Right, so it's discovery. It's discovery. And so you have to give the designers slightly left-field briefs, even though you know what you know commercially. You're set out by the commercial team. I need to deliver a car that does this. Do you get a brief from marketing? Yeah. And how angry do you get when that comes through? Or are you quite understanding of what it needs to achieve? So in my role, I have to be understanding. But to get the best out of the team, I make them break the rules all the time. And actually early in projects, I probably don't make many friends because actually what I'm trying to do is break the rules to find the edges of the box. Yeah, yeah. To actually find where we should be because if you do something on day one that's acceptable, then by the time you forget this car, the team finished work two years, design team. Did you really? Yeah, that's how long it's supposed to last. It's also very nice inside. Kind of what you expect a car of this price and quality to feel and smell like, except in reality. It's two seats only. I remember the original Vanquish was technically a two plus two, but you couldn't put people in the back. This has no seats in the back because they're taken up by this big carbon fibre strut brace. Although you can have some bespoke Aston Martin luggage to go on those little shelves. Then it's got the full suite of new Aston Martin screens and dials and this central console, which is a little bit more levelled out than compared to things like a DB12. And I have to say, I do sort of regret not having analogue sweeping dials, but the digital screen is quite clear. It's a lot slicker than Aston's of old and it's got these really nice, heavy little rotary controls. They feel really metallic and really quality, and generally it feels like a much more sophisticated piece of kit than than any Aston I've driven for a long time. And it is the details that count. This is the gear selector, a little toggle switch, and then this rotary dial here controls the drive modes and you can have individual wet GT mode, sport and sport plus. And then you've got paddles to control your gears. After that, you can have sport seats as standard, but you can have carbon fibre bucket type ones as an option. And it also has a full length glass roof, which stops 95% of all UV rays. So you won't get sunburn, even though you can't change it or have a cover. You can also option that in carbon fibre. But to be honest, you can have pretty much anything you want because Aston Martin's Q division does everything bespoke, but at a price. So what do we actually got? Well, this is not your skinny latte, egg white omelette, green juice kind of car. It's more red meat and a pint of absinthe. It is quite a big, long car and it's very heavy, or at least it feels it when you're going slowly over 1900 kilograms. It needs quite a bit of power to get it moving. Luckily, it's got it. Now that is a 5.2 litre V12 with two turbos. It's got more power and torque than Aston Martin's own Vulcan. But it's the torque figure that you really feel because this thing pulls through the mid-range like the Horizon owes it money. It's like falling horizontally towards the view. Watch this. Bloody hell. Oh, my. Suddenly doesn't feel so fat now, does it? You all right, though? Noise? Well, yes, it's got it. It's got like a lovely, chunky, deep-chested rumble at slow speed that builds to a kind of, I don't know, like a leonine roar at higher revs. But it's not got that kind of spine-tingling operatic stuff that you get with a naturally aspirated car because it's turbocharged. And turbos will often muffle the noise of even the most glorious engine. But the interesting thing is that those turbos themselves are actually quite trick. Now, those turbos feature something called boost reserve, which is a system that essentially restricts the intake flow to the turbo and uses the wastegate to store up some boost pressure. When you go for full throttle after being off it, it releases the stored pressure to give you better throttle response. I can't feel it working as such, but I have to say that it doesn't feel like a car that's waiting for boost. You hit it, it's there. And you know what? It does actually make it feel more responsive. When you throw in those higher speed, low inertia turbos, a strengthened block, different camshafts, bigger injectors, all that kind of stuff, you get a car that has an engine that's less an engine and more of a kind of controlled volcanic explosion. But we do have to mention the Italian elephant in the room, the Ferrari Dodici Cylindri, another hyper GT with a V12. The Aston is a tiny bit cheaper, heavier, but has a lot more torque. That's turbos for you. The Ferrari has a bigger capacity, but it's naturally aspirated and revs higher. They're within a few tenths of each other in terms of pace. But from what I can gather, the Aston feels like it's going to punch harder through the gears. But that Ferrari is going to have the high rev sparkle. So actually, it will come down to the kind of experience you like best. But the good thing about the Vanquish is that it doesn't feel like just an engine with a bit of car attached to it. You can get sort of fooled by cars with really high horsepower figures into thinking they're good when actually they're just a bit of a thug. But for 330 grand, I want a car that's got a bit of finesse to go with the brutality. I want an ergonomic grip on my knuckle duster. And the Vanquish isn't a ballet dancer, but it does know how to get down a road. And that's partly because it's got a Trixie E diff, which helps balance the torque between the rear wheels and makes it feel like it turns in really fast. Very quick linear steering and absolutely monster brakes. You get the feeling that there are no half measures here. It's like trying to run down a really steep hill. You either speed up to accommodate or you will fall flat on your face and break your nose. It's not perfect. There are some slight annoyances. The multimedia screen has really tiny graphics, so you can't read them properly when you're going fast. The back end can feel a little bit loose and that gearbox that's so nice in town isn't quite so clinical when you're going for it. But it makes up in sheer savagery what it lacks in grip or font size. It does not feel smaller when you go fast. And that boost reserve thing really seems to be there when I need it. You're not waiting for the turbos to kick in. Jesus, it's quick. Madel operated eight-speed auto and it's not quite as fast as a DSG. So there's a slight hesitation when you change down, but it's nothing that would scare me. The weird thing is, though, these roads here in Sardinia are not actually the most grippy and it is finding grip. And I can almost feel that rear diff just trying to sort out traction. And then you can knock it back a couple of clicks back into GT mode and just cruise. Now, ultimately, it might not be as precise as a mid-engine something on these really twisty roads or somewhere where you need downforce or something like that. But for me, it's got more breadth of ability. I'd use more of this car more of the time. And I actually think it's probably a little bit more fun. It just doesn't take itself as seriously. But this isn't the kind of clinical teleportation of electric speed. It's a violent, noisy, hot kind of vortex of fury. And I absolutely love it. That's the thing here, though, two completely different characters. Supercars on the road for me always feel a little bit hemmed. And all that fancy aero only really ever starts working when you're at high speed on a track. And don't even get me started on track only hypercars, which are more than a little bit pointless, in my opinion. The thing with a GT car, though, is you could, if you were fabulously rich daily, something like this, you could trawl it through town and then you could drive it to the south of France from the UK without batting an eyelid. The interesting thing is, though, now the Vanquish has the power and the poise to make things interesting when you get to the twisty stuff. Supercars are dead. Long live the hyper GT.