Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 22 i Vantage

DESPITE OUR BEST efforts to convert them, most people have little interest in cars. A friend (whose family comes from the Swiss Alpine village of Wengen, where there are no cars at all) recently disclosed that he has great difficulty remembering the difference between Aston Martin and Austin. In truth, the only Aston the general public really knows or cares about is the one driven by a certain morally flexible Secret Service agent. That being the case, you can expect to read plenty about Aston Martin in the national press over the next few weeks, for one of 007’s famous MI6 pool cars is heading to auction, and it is, in this correspondent’s view, the most desirable of the whole lot: the Goldeneye DB5. More accurately, chassis 1885/R is one…

‘It retains the ability to dispatch huge distances, but there’s incentive now to search for more challenging roads’ ‘We fought over that half millimetre,’ admits DB11 AMR chief engineer Matt Becker. He’s referring to the diameter of the front anti-roll bar and it underlines the obsessive lengths to which Becker and his team have gone to create the DB11 AMR. That half-millimetre is less than the distance a second hand covers each time it ticks on a watch-face, and it’s crucial, argued the dynamics team. ‘It allows the front to work better,’ says Becker, and, when combined with a host of other chassis changes, he continues, is transformative. That’s vital because the AMR is the new DB11 flagship, replacing the standard V12 model, its 5.2-litre twin-turbo 12-cylinder gaining 30bhp in…

THIS YEAR’S LE MANS 24 HOURS starts at 4pm on June 16. For an excellent live stream of the race, visit lemans.org, while for witty, informed commentary, head to radiolemans.com. Another great source of updates is the official Aston Martin Racing Twitter feed, @AMR_Official. Look out for the new Vantage in the GTE Pro category and the old-shape Vantage in GTE Am. For added fever, there’s a special 45-minute Aston Martin Festival race, which takes place as part of the LM24 build-up on the Saturday morning.…

‘IF IT DRIVES LIKE IT LOOKS, THE NEW VANTAGE PROMISES TO BE THRILLING BUT SLIGHTLY UNSETTLING’ So this is the new V8 Vantage. The smaller, steelier sibling to the suave DB11, and the second all-new model in Aston Martin’s Second Century Plan. It succeeds the much-loved VH-generation V8 Vantage – not only the most successful model in Aston’s history, but one of the longest-serving, too, with more than a dozen years on the front line. The world – and indeed Aston Martin – is very different in 2018 than it was in 2005 when the outgoing car was launched. The price is different, too, with Aston’s baby now requiring a minimum of £120,900. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. So, as with the VH Vantage,…

‘TADEK MAREK HADN’T ENVISAGED THE DB4 ENGINE AS A RACING UNIT. GENERAL MANAGER JOHN WYER THOUGHT OTHERWISE’ Given the success and significance of the DBR1, it’s no surprise that its big brother tends to be overlooked when people talk about great Aston Martins. But the DBR2 deserves its share of the limelight, even if it didn’t have so many famous wins. It came close to greatness itself – it could have won Le Mans in 1957, according to John Wyer. As with the DBR4 Grand Prix car, the record books do not really tell us what a special car it is. So we need to look a little deeper. To understand the DBR2, it’s best to view it as the confluence of three separate strands: ever-changing motorsport regulations; the birth…

‘IMAGINE MORE POWER THAN A V12 VANTAGE S IN SOMETHING THE WEIGHT OF A SMART CAR’ It’s a great question for those with a penchant for Aston Martin trivia: when did a car so-powered last hold the lead at the Le Mans 24 Hours? The marque’s recent efforts in France have been both mighty and successful, but always in pursuit of class, not outright victory. Many would probably conclude that it was when the DBR1 of Carroll Shelby and Roy Salvadori swept over the line to claim what remains to date the company’s only outright victory in the French classic in 1959. But, as all who know anything about the 1962 race will recall, they’d be wrong. Because three years after that win, Graham Hill appeared at the end of…

V600. IF YOU’RE OLD ENOUGH to remember Aston’s late-90s twin-supercharged behemoth, then the hairs on the back of your neck have just prickled on reading that iconic alphanumeric name. The reason for its resurrection? A fitting last hurrah for the ‘VH’ Vantage. Commissioned through Gaydon’s bespoke skunkworks ‘Q by Aston Martin’ by a particularly adventurous customer, the 2018 V12 Vantage V600 evokes the spirit of the 1998 V8 Vantage V600 with a celebratory run of seven coupés and seven roadsters to mark the end of the line for the most successful model in Aston Martin’s history. In essence, the V600 is an evolution of the unicorn-like Vantage AMR Pro, which in turn took its inspiration from Aston Martin Racing’s V8 Vantage GTE World Endurance Championship racer and 2017 Le Mans…

PRODUCTION of the DB4 GT Continuation model continues apace at Aston Martin Works in Newport Pagnell, and in May a group of some of the earliest customers were able to put their cars through their paces at a Silverstone trackday. It certainly made for a stirring sight, as five owners from around the world were able to drive their cars on the circuit where the very first DB4 GT made its competition debut in the hands of Stirling Moss in 1959, winning first time out. Just 25 of the Continuation cars are being hand-built at the old factory site – the first time new cars have been built there since mk1 Vanquish production ended in 2007 – and part of the ownership package is a two-year international programme of exclusive…

SATURDAY MAY 5 saw the World Endurance Championship (WEC) kick-off its monster 2018/19 ‘Super Season’ in fine style with the Six Hours of Spa-Francorchamps. In recent years, it has been Silverstone that has hosted the season-opener in April, with Spa’s early-May slot serving as a strong second round and the perfect preamble to Le Mans in June. This year’s re-shuffled WEC schedule bestowed greater significance on Spa, being the new season-opener and the teams’ only competitive outing prior to the greatest endurance race of them all. For Aston Martin Racing (AMR), Spa was also the competition debut of the all-new turbocharged Vantage GTE in the GTE Pro category, while the venerable naturally aspirated Vantage soldiers-on for one last season in GTE Am. After an exhaustive development programme over the winter,…

THE LE MANS 24 HOURS had been central to Aston Martin’s racing DNA long before the DBR1 took its historic victory in 1959. And Astons have competed in the world’s best-known endurance race in every decade since, sometimes as factory-backed entries, sometimes in the hands of plucky privateers. We celebrate several of them in this special issue of Vantage. While not an especially happy hunting ground for the British marque – the ’59 triumph remains its only outright win – in recent times it has become a regular challenger for class wins in the GT categories, thanks to the unstinting efforts of the Aston Martin Racing team. This year is a big one for AMR, as not only is the crack Banbury-based squad looking to defend last year’s GTE Pro…

As it crossed the finishing line at the end of the 1977 Le Mans 24 Hours, it was entirely apt that the company colours of the Aston Martin’s title sponsor were red, white and blue. For the British bulldog – and very much the underdog on the tightest of shoestring budgets among the 55 entrants – it was a brilliant result that defied all the naysayers’ expectations. Even more so, given that it had failed to qualify for the race, only getting a last-minute reprieve after another car was disqualified. As Autosport reported: ‘Of the other British entrants, the Robin Hamilton team was the only one to come away from the Sarthe with a real sense of achievement, for the Aston Martin droned on and on and never once looked…

VANTAGE. The word has a special resonance for anyone who loves Aston Martins. And, while what it signifies has changed many times over the decades, its very mention has always set our pulses beating just a little faster. At this precise moment, its original meaning is being distilled for me with crystal clarity… I’m in a dayglo orange DB6, powering down the outside lane of the M1 near Newport Pagnell, and the only thing more shocking than the paintwork is the speed this thing is making. That and the nape-prickling soundtrack of the straight-six Vantage-spec engine, snorting fuel through triple Weber carburettors and exhaling through twin, highly polished tailpipes slung low beneath its sharply cut Kamm tail. We’ve the perfect excuse: the car has been in storage for weeks and…

Sixty years ago in October, Aston Martin launched the DB4 at the Paris motor show. It was one of those pivotal moments that happen only a handful of times in the story of a motor manufacturer, and nothing would ever be quite the same again. There had been plenty of good-looking Astons before, from the pre-war Ulster to the DB MkIII that was the company’s production mainstay by the late ’50s. The DB4 brought something new. Unmistakably Aston Martin, but glamorous and sophisticated in a way no Aston had ever been before, it bestowed Ferrari/Maserati levels of desirability. That was no accident, of course, David Brown having turned to Italy to clothe the new engine and chassis. The shape was credited to Touring of Milan – these were the days…

THE DBS IS BACK! Or at least it will be by the time you read this, for as we closed for press Aston Martin was poised to release full details and reveal official images of its new flagship, the new DBS Superleggera. Replacing the Vanquish as Aston’s series-production flagship, the DBS follows the marque’s familiar super-GT format but promises to take it to new levels, courtesy of a high-output version of the marque’s 5.2-litre twin-turbo V12. Of course we’ll miss the magnificent, naturally aspirated 5.9-litre V12 that made the Vanquish S (and the previous DBS, pictured above right) so memorable, but given that there’s talk of 700bhp-plus and tarmac-rucking quantities of torque, the new DBS looks set to be positioned firmly in Ferrari territory – at least in terms of…

DAFFODILS AND SNOW… The Arctic reached Sussex and made for a glacial rather than glorious 76th Goodwood Members Meeting in the middle of March. One of the longest and coldest winters was thankfully broken in style this year by many sunny events, but not before this now-established season-opener saw freezing temperatures; at one stage even the track was being salted to drive away the ice. Conditions were not too bad for the Moss Trophy, which saw two DB4 GTs take on hordes of E-types and Italian cars. Honour was upheld with Wolfgang Friedrichs/Simon Hadfield coming home 6th from Tom Alexander/Adrian Willmott despite the Freidrichs GT having a huge spin on the treacherous track. The first weekend of May saw the Donington Historic Festival basking in welcome sunshine for a full…

The day I saved DP199 from a watery fate! Your readers are probably familiar with the DB4 GT prototype, DP199, which sold at auction last year for $6.77m. I’d like to take you back to a much earlier period in the car’s life, when I became its owner for the princely sum of £350! Fifty years ago, in 1968, racer Mike Salmon advertised a couple of Astons for sale. One of them was DP199, which Mike had bought from its first private owner, the Hon Gerald Lascelles, a cousin of the Queen, a few years earlier. The asking price was £2000, which was quite a lot at the time. A friend of mine, Dave Milburn, whose father owned a large transport firm on Teesside, saw the ad and suggested to…

2007 DBR9 Aston Martin Racing was formed in 2004 by Prodrive’s David Richards to run the marque’s racing activities, with the WEC – and Le Mans in particular – their main focus. Their weapon was the DB9-based DBR9, and in 2007 they scored a memorable GT1 class win, with Darren Turner, David Brabham and Rickard Rydell driving 009. 2008 DBR9 A sister DBR9 – also wearing 009 but now in the iconic Gulf colours – would deliver a second GT1 class win the following year, Turner this time sharing the driving with Brabham and Antonio Garcia. DBR9s would carry on racing until the end of the GT1 category in 2011, but would never quite scale the heights of 2007 and 2008 again. 2017 VANTAGE GTE The racing version of the…