Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 14 i Vantage

ASTON MARTIN IS BUILDING a hypercar. Not a track-only follow-up to the Vulcan, but a fully fledged road-legal machine that promises to set stratospheric new performance benchmarks. The project, known internally as Nebula, is the first fruit of the partnership between Aston Martin and the Red Bull Formula 1 team. Hard information remains sketchy, but, from what we’ve been told and whispers we’ve heard, all indications are that it will stand alongside the McLaren F1 – itself built by an F1 team and conceived by Gordon Murray – as an era-defining car and a truly remarkable Aston Martin. Led by Red Bull’s genius designer, Adrian Newey (a long-time Aston owner), the AM-RB 001 will be a rolling thesis in cutting-edge aerodynamics and packaging. The challenge for Aston Martin’s director of…

THE SILVERSTONE GRAND PRIX circuit played host to the opening round of the 2016 world endurance championship (WEC), a large home crowd braving wintry conditions to see the best marques, teams and drivers go head-to-head in the world’s best race series. and after an encouraging winter’s testing of its new GTE contender, aston martin racing (AMR) went to the fast northamptonshire circuit with high hopes of a strong start to the season. The departure of long-standing AMR driver stefan mücke (now driving for rivals ford) has prompted a shake-up in AMR’s driver line-up, with mücke’s former driving partner darren turner made an honorary dane and joining nicki thiim and marco sørensen in the #95 GTE pro vantage. in AMR’s other GTE pro entry, scot Jonny adam graduates to a race…

HOW EXACTLY is it possible, we keep asking ourselves, for a three-owner DB AR1 Zagato to have covered fewer than 700 miles in 13 years? Like a wasp in a jar this question has clattered around our brains for weeks now, in a quarter that has given us little else to think about. The Tungsten Silver 2003 DB AR1 was one of only three Aston Martins offered at the annual Amelia Island auctions in March (Bonhams brought a V8 Volante and Virage Coupé to the party), and was sold by RM Sotheby’s for $363,000 – $63,000 more than its top estimate. The premium price was, of course, a function of the car’s bewilderingly unused condition; sadly the market’s fetish for no-mileage cars is likely keep this Aston off the road…

The ’phone rang. I turned down the wireless and picked up. ‘Go to Oxfordshire and drive The Persuaders Aston,’ said The Voice. ‘Report back.’ That was it. No ‘Andrew darling, join me for an alcohol-sated lunch. I’ll pitch the feature and pay for your cab home...’. I looked out of the window as the wind clattered rain at the glass like handfuls of gravel. Just what were we all doing in September 1971 when Diana Ross’s I’m Still Waiting topped the hit parade, Ted Heath won the Admiral’s Cup, Duke Ellington played the USSR and Overture, the first of 24 chronicles of the life and times of playboys Lord Brett Sinclair and Danny Wilde, debuted on ITV? The Persuaders! What a title, though it attracted the catchy sobriquet Gullguttene in…

People who don’t own an Aston Martin or haven’t had the pleasure of driving a recent Vantage, DB9, Vanquish or Rapide seem always to be clamouring for change. A new model arrives with a shade more power and a facelift and they throw their arms in the air. ‘Boring! Give us something new!’ they lament. But I’m guessing that many customers – and potential customers – are pretty happy for Aston Martin to follow a path of steady evolution. To keep the sublime elegance, the exquisite sense of proportion, and engines that might not ‘do the numbers’ compared with some rivals but absolutely hit the spot in terms of noise, character and sense of occasion. Yet change is coming. Those dissenters will get their way and some of the changes…

A controversial subject for heroism status? Well, heroes aren’t always whiter than white, and sometimes to do heroic things you have to bend the rules a bit. But look at what Tom Walkinshaw did for two of the most illustrious, best-loved names in Britain’s motoring history. Jaguar was floundering under British Leyland and needed a boost, and in 1982 Tom Walkinshaw Racing (TWR) made a fierce European Touring Car racer out of the silken XJ-S. In 1984 he won the championship. Next, TWR developed a series of Jaguar-badged Group C endurance racing cars, initially using highly developed, bigcapacity versions of Jaguar’s V12 engine. The team won the World Sports Car Championship in 1987 and Le Mans in 1988. Various other racing connections grew and prospered, notably a 35 per cent…

ASTON MARTIN AND ITALIAN design house Zagato have joined forces once again to launch a new limited-edition model, the Aston Martin Vanquish Zagato. The new car was unveiled at the prestigious Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este on the banks of Lake Como, Italy, just as this issue of Vantage went to press. That’s the same event at which the 2011 V12 Zagato was unveiled, and the Vanquish Zagato follows on from that model in style but is even more comprehensively equipped, making it the most luxurious Aston Martin yet made. The model is the result of a close collaboration between Andrea Zagato, company CEO (and grandson of founder Ugo Zagato), and Aston Martin’s chief exterior designer, Miles Nurnberger, the whole project overseen by design director Marek Reichman. The bodywork is produced…

IT MIGHT BE GETTING LONG in the tooth, but the V8 Vantage is showing no signs of losing its bite if the GT8 is anything to go by. Following in the slipstream of its big brother the GT3-inspired GT12, the GT8 is Aston’s road-going interpretation of its Vantage GTE World Endurance Championship contender. Developed by Aston’s Special Projects team, the £165,000 GT8 is a strictly limited-edition model with a production run of 150 cars. Powered by a slightly more powerful iteration of the familiar 4.7-litre naturally aspirated V8, the GT8 has 440bhp and 361lb ft of torque and is available with a choice of six-speed manual or seven-speed Sportshift II paddleshift gearbox. Performance? Well, it’ll hit 60mph from a standstill in 4.4sec and storm on to a top speed of…

IT SEEMS ONLY YESTERDAY that the sun set on the 2015 season but, as with F1, classic events seem to grow in number and increasingly stretch across the calendar. April saw the re-run of the famous Tour Auto, now known as the Tour Auto Optic 2000. Unusually, there was only one Aston Martin in the event but it was a rather special, French-entered DB2, one of the few, very early ‘three-grille’ cars with the ‘washboard’ side-vents. This is a well-sorted car and the driver pairing of Laurent and Marion Desplaces finished a fine 19th overall out of 67 starters. Run at a rather more leisurely pace, but on equally wonderful roads, was the Scottish Malts rally in late April, blessed with decent weather and some superb cars. The DB2 of…

DB4 GT Zagato print by Arthur Schening $30 www.scheningcreative.com Artists are drawn to the shapely DB4 GT Zagato like moths to a flame, and the latest to trace its lines is the American illustrator Arthur Schening, whose many 19x13in prints – Group C racers are a favourite subject – are dangerously affordable. Autodromo Prototipo chronograph $625 www.autodromo.com Proof that a properly smart drivers’ watch needn’t cost the Earth, the Prototipo features a clever Seiko hybrid ‘meca-quartz’ movement (quartz for timekeeping, mechanical for the chronograph function), and styling that reminds us that product design in the 1970s wasn’t all bad. Piloti Superleggera racing boots £180 www.piloti.uk.com The super-comfortable, FIA/SFI-approved Superleggera remains the pick of the Piloti range, but the brand now offers a variety of smarter shoes, too, for those occasions…

‘Mr Bridger. I’ve got a job lined up. This is important. Four million dollars in gold. Europe. The Common Market. Italy…’ This approach by Charlie Croker (Michael Caine) to get Mr Bridger (Noël Coward) to back his planned heist has a particular resonance just now, as the UK prepares to go to the polls to decide whether or not it wants to stay in the EU. The Italian Job was in large part a satire on the Common Market, as the European Union was then known. Plucky, cheeky Brits take on Europe and the Mafia and steal Chinese gold from under the noses of the Turin Police… In 1968, when the film was shot, the Common Market was becoming a hot topic and the political momentum to become a part…

ANDY PALMER IS offering me a set of keys, holding them up so I can see how small they look. They may not be much to look at, but I know that they will unlock and start the immaculate 1980 Aston V8 Vantage that we’re standing next to. ‘Do you want to drive?’ he asks. Of course I do. But keen as I am to experience what was, when new, one of the fastest cars on the planet, my first instinct is to decline this very generous offer. Because this Vantage is Palmer’s personal car, bought for a considerable sum last year and having just emerged from a hefty service at Aston Martin Works in Newport Pagnell that I’m sure will have been accompanied by an equally weighty bill. It…

I think we can all agree that the original Vanquish is a fabulous car and a real landmark for Aston Martin. It featured a bonded aluminium chassis developed in conjunction with Lotus, which set the template for all future models. It utilised carbonfibre and other composites in the structure and crash boxes, further underlining Aston Martin’s new confidence to push the limits and look at innovative materials and technologies. The beautifully sculpted yet powerful styling also set a new aesthetic that’s endured to this day… In fact, I don’t think it’s been surpassed yet. It looks sensational and impossibly glamorous, even parked up beside a Little Chef in a nondescript service station, which is where I find this rather special Vanquish that’s been given a unique engineering twist by the…

IT DOESN’T GET MUCH COOLER than pointing the long, elegant bonnet of your Aston Martin south and not stopping until you get to Monaco on a warm summer’s evening. Maybe you’ll stay at the Hotel de Paris, spend an evening on the tables at the Casino de Monte-Carlo. The next day? A short amble down to the Hercules Port and then a day on the yacht, I guess. And it would be only natural and fitting for the yacht to be as effortlessly stylish as your Vanquish or One-77. Which is where the AM37 comes in, a collaboration between Quintessence Yachts and Aston Martin. And just about the most ridiculously desirable object on planet Earth. Aston Martin’s design department is obviously incredibly highly regarded even beyond the usual automotive boundaries.…

AS WE CLOSED FOR PRESS, news was emerging from Aston Martin Works of an extraordinary plan to produce a special series of DB4 GT Continuation cars. Details were sketchy, but it seems the cars will be completely new, rather than relying on original DB4 donor cars. As you would expect, numbers will be limited. The precise quantity is unknown, but is unlikely to approach the 75 original DB4 GTs built in period. If one were in the mood to speculate, a further 25 cars would round things up nicely. Practically and emotionally, Works’ recently refurbished facilities at Newport Pagnell are the perfect place in which to build this new batch of cars, and the combined pool of knowledge and experience at the Tickford Street premises is second-to-none. The decision to…

Like a once-common species persecuted to the brink of extinction, sports cars with manual gearboxes have been on the endangered list for years. Thankfully, Aston Martin has assumed the role of conservationist by offering its sportiest series-production model – the V12 Vantage S – with the option of a stick shift for the first time. It’s an unexpected but wholly popular move. CEOAndy Palmer is a self-confessed petrolhead, so you just know this is something he’s championed. He’s a good man is AP. Of course, it’s impossible to discuss the V12VS without recapping, or rather paying reverential respect, to its frankly blistering specification and performance. There’s always been something wondrous about the concept of a car as compact as the Vantage concealing a stonking V12, and the V12VS takes this…

THE DEVIL’S HAIRPIN is not among the world’s greatest motor racing films. Released in 1957, it celebrates a world where men use gallons of hair oil and thump tables in an aggressive manner and Packards have whitewall tyres. The screenplay seems to revolve around Cornel Wilde as Nick, a racing driver who finally regains the championship and the affections of his parrot (it is a strange picture), but in amongst the high drama and ‘Pretty Pollys’ is an Aston Martin DB3S. Similarly, few would put 1962’s The Brain – millionaire businessman’s brain is kept alive post-accident – on a list of significant British horror films, but it does feature a DB4 Series 4 in amongst the low-budget histrionics. Connoisseurs of Aston Martin and Lagonda have long realised that there is…

LIKE ALL CHAPTERS in Aston Martin’s history, the journey from first to last DB9 has been eventful to say the least. From its triumphant launch – symbolic for also setting in motion the Gaydon era – and immediate sales success to the dark days of the global financial crisis and the fight back to financial security, the DB9 has stood firm. The ‘DB’ models have long been the bedrock of Aston Martin. As standard-bearers for the marque, it’s the DBs that have consistently possessed and displayed the qualities that define what separates an Aston from the rest. In modern marketing speak, they are custodians of Aston Martin’s DNA. As such, it was inevitable that the team responsible for reinventing the company – a surprisingly small group of passionate engineers and…

THE ONE-77 IS THE SORT OF CAR around which legends are spun. One customer, so the story went, bought a second example just so he could have it stripped down to its naked carbonfibre tub, with the sole intention of displaying it in his home as a piece of art. Another bought not one, not two, but ten cars. More than one buyer insisted that their One-77s forgo the usual pre-delivery test drive so that they could be delivered – and inevitably salted away in dehumidified storage – with zero miles on the clock. All good stories, and all, as far as we can ascertain, true. All of which appears to confirm the suspicion that cars like the One-77 – billed as the fastest and most expensive Aston ever, and…

Engineering is Tim Butcher’s passion, equalled only by his love of Aston Martins. Such is his evangelical zeal for both that after an hour in his company you too may very well feel a compulsion to roll up your sleeves and get stuck into a DB2/4 diff. You will also start to believe that there is no greater joy on this Earth than stripping an Aston to its constituent parts then building it back up, better than new. Tim is owner and sole director of Trinity Engineering, which is based in Cobham, Surrey. And if the location has a familiar ring to it, that’s probably because it’s also the home town of a certain RS Williams. Pretty ballsy, you’d think, to set up shop barely a crank’s throw from one…