Yahoo Finance New Aston Martin Vantage Is a Luxury Muscle Car
We are already in a world where combustion cars live alongside the EVs that will ultimately displace them; like dinosaurs sharing the planet with those nifty new mammals. At the sharpest and most expensive end of the market, the difference between the two competing evolutionary strains is already stark, and despite 656 hp, the heavily revised Aston Martin Vantage arrives as an also-ran on raw performance.
It’s not even close. In April, R&T drove the Porsche Taycan Turbo GT for the first time on the Monteblanco Circuit near Seville, Spain—an experience that stretched my adjectives to near-breaking point. The Porsche is an EV that, on official and likely cautious numbers, is as quick as a Bugatti Chiron from rest to 100 mph. By happy coincidence, Monteblanco is also the track chosen for the introduction of the new Aston Martin Vantage, along with the chance to experience it on some of the same local roads as the Taycan. Yet while the Aston might not have the same physics-bending urge, it more than makes up in terms of visceral experience. It is welcome proof that faster isn’t always better; the Aston’s base price is a useful $35,000 less, too.
The outgoing Vantage certainly never felt underpowered, the run-out F1 Edition having a mighty 528 hp. But the new car uses a revised version of the same basic AMG-sourced 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8 to deliver a 25 percent increase in output thanks to new turbochargers and a revised top end. The new 590 lb-ft torque peak is 85 lb-ft higher than before, too. An eight-speed automatic gearbox remains the only transmission choice; sadly there will never be another manual Vantage. The entire output is delivered through the rear axle through a torque-vectoring rear differential. The final drive has also been lowered to improve acceleration—Aston claiming a 3.4-sec 0-60 mph time.
The increased output is largely responsible for the new Vantage’s more aggressive looks, with the engine’s cooling requirements leading to the bigger front grille and, Aston says, a 50-percent increase in the size of the radiators. Front arches have also been widened to cover a one-inch increase in track, and the headlights are now smaller all-LED units. Beyond small vents set into the rear bumper, the rear is effectively unchanged.
Much more radical alterations have taken place inside, where the Vantage has been given the equivalent of a full teardown restoration, getting an all-new dashboard and entirely new control interface. The outgoing car’s tiny, button-strewn center console was an ergonomic mess, the new dashboard replaces this with a much larger sloping console with larger, clearer switchgear—the layout identical to the one in the DB12. The biggest usability gain is the arrival of a 10.2-inch touchscreen in place of the previous small display and its fiddly non-touch interface. The new UI is easy to use and delivers on the essentials of controlling vehicle functions and smartphone integration; it’s not especially snazzy by modern standards, but it is vastly better than the old car’s prehistoric system. This might not seem to be a particularly significant change for a luxury sportscar, but Aston says that frustrations with the old cabin and UI were the most frequent complaints from owners and potential buyers of the outgoing model.
While I’m certainly not going to be the guy who complains about the existence of any 650-hp V-8, driving the new Vantage on roads did raise the question of whether the increased output brings much beyond bragging rights. The revised engine feels more obviously turbocharged than before, with huge muscle in the mid-to-upper reaches of its rev range, but slow responses low down as boost pressures build. With its gearbox left selecting its own ratios in Drive, the Vantage tries to fight lag by kicking down aggressively to build revs. Frankly, too aggressively in the Sport Plus mode, where even the gentlest extra pressure on the gas has it shedding gears. Taking manual control of gear selection through the paddles behind the steering wheel reveals the reason for the transmission’s keenness: the distinct gap between making a big accelerator input and full boost arriving when the V-8 is spinning below 3000 rpm. This isn’t anything close to old-fashioned all-or-nothing turbo lag, and it actually adds to the sense of the engine’s huge potency, but the Vantage is definitely not one of those performance cars that hides its forced induction.
This Vantage’s dynamic character has also shifted subtly. On road, the new car feels more GT-ish than its predecessor did, despite firmer suspension settings, especially in the gentlest of the switchable drive modes. This is labeled Sport, but in Spain it felt more like a comfort setting, the adaptive dampers remaining soft enough to allow plenty of suspension travel over bumps and compressions but without becoming floaty. Moving to the firmer Sport Plus or Track modes makes the Vantage feel much more like its predecessor, the ride turning firmer and responses more aggressive. Sadly it also brings the over-enthusiastic gearbox algorithm mentioned above. The loss of the old car’s separate powertrain and chassis modes means the only way to mix and match settings is now with a new Individual function. Steering feel has also improved, with much more low-load off-center sensation getting through the electric power assistance.
Another big factor in the Vantage’s more mature personality are the changes to the torque-juggling active differential on the rear axle. In the outgoing car this would heavily bias effort to the outside wheel in punchier powertrain modes to help turn the car into corners, but also create the edgy sense of an impending rear-end breakaway – often well before the point where the tires were running short of grip. Which was exciting, but diminished the fidelity of car-to-driver communication. Now the differential’s contribution is much more subtle, still the Vantage to rotate and fight understeer, but feeling much more organic as it does so—with the huge grip of the Michelin Pilot Sport 5 S tires on warm, smooth Spanish asphalt delivering huge traction at road speeds.
Moving to the track at Monteblanco was a different story, with the Vantage’s handling balance proving to be much more rear-led under circuit speeds and loadings. Aston executives admit that few existing Vantage buyers regularly track their cars – but the aspiration is clearly for more to do so. Even out of the box the new Vantage is quicker and more composed than the F1 Edition on a circuit, with the high likelihood that an even more focussed track variant will follow.
The cars I drove at Monteblanco had the optional carbon-ceramic brakes, which will likely be a must-tick box for anybody considering regular track work. The combination of the Vantage’s 3540-lb weight and the speeds it could carry into the circuit’s many hard braking zones—hauling down an indicated 160 mph to 30 mph every time at the end of the main straight - created huge thermal loads. These were handled without pedal fade or any sign of distress. The Aston’s mass felt obvious in tighter turns where combining late apexes and early throttle applications made it much happier than trying to achieve the highest minimum corner speed.
Monteblanco’s slower turns also gave the chance to play with the variable traction control system. In Sport Plus or Track modes hitting the Vantage’s ESP button brings up a new display on the digital dashboard showing the level of traction intervention, this then tweaked by what is otherwise the drive mode dial on the center console. Position 1 gives the slightest level of slip, while position 9 is fully off, the algorithm then varying the amount of wheelspin allowed at different speeds.
According to a neat chart shared by Simon Newton, Aston’s director of vehicle performance, the mid-way position 5 allows up to 200 percent of slip—wheel speed versus road speed—when starting, with this reducing to around 50 percent at 12 mph and less than 20 percent at 25 mph. The idea isn’t new, and isn’t quite a drift mode—rather one that reduces the need for lots of throttle management once a slide is engendered. In my experience, it proved capable of delivering heroic-feeling oversteer in tighter turns, as (less tidily) did switching the stability management fully off. But will real Vantage buyers ever want to drive their cars so brutally?
Porsche and Aston ran different configurations of the track for their respective events at Monteblanco, denying the chance of any kind of lap time comparison between these two different eras. Had one been possible, I’ve absolutely no doubt the Taycan Turbo GT would have been substantially quicker, and we all know it gives a far better indication of what the future of the performance car will look like. Yet I also had considerably more fun sliding and showboating in the savage, rowdy Aston Martin than I did going quickly in the nailed-down Porsche. We need to cherish cars like the Vantage as we move towards the brave new world.
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