Indice dei contenuti per Issue 31 in Vantage

WHEN LARGE COMPANIES change leader they often go for a radically different character to mark the new era. But a glance at the career highlights of Aston’s new boss, 54-year-old Tobias Moers, reveals several obvious similarities to the recently departed Dr Andy Palmer. Like his predecessor, Moers is a trained automotive engineer as well as an unarguable ‘car guy’, one who worked his way up the ranks and who has developed a reputation as a forceful but respected leader. As Palmer did, Moers is also leaving a secure role within a large corporation to lead a much smaller player. Moers joined AMG in 1994, when it was a Mercedes engine tuner and motorsport outfit. His responsibilities grew as AMG’s activities did, firstly through full acquisition by Daimler, then the creation…

IT WILL TAKE more than a global pandemic to prevent members of the Aston Martin Owners Club getting their concours fix. This year’s Spring Concours and Bonhams Sale, which had been due to take place at Loseley Park in mid-May, was an early victim of the coronavirus as the UK went into lockdown in March. Not to be deterred, AMOC concours director and chief judge Mark Donoghue hit on the idea of the Virtual Concours – and the response from members was even better than he’d dared hope for. ‘It was, in fact, the first ever truly international event that the AMOC has put on,’ Donoghue told Vantage, ‘and the response was absolutely brilliant. We had 244 entries in total from 16 countries around the world. ‘We were also able…

DB4 GT Zagato sculpture by Antoine Dufilho £POA | marcianocontemporary.com The magical lines of the DB4 GT Zagato are given an appropriately spellbinding treatment by French artist Antoine Dufilho, his crosssectional steel sculpture revealing different curves depending on the position of the viewer. Roy Salvadori and Carroll Shelby signed photograph $425 | arteauto.com A little more than a day and 2706 miles after this photo was taken, Salvadori, Shelby and their DBR1 all looked slightly less fresh, but they had written themselves into the history books by winning the 1959 24 Hours of Le Mans. Red Bull Racing wireless headphones by IRIS £379 | irislistenwell.com These boast beryllium drivers and 37 hours of battery life, and since Christian Horner and co have adopted IRIS’s audio technology in the pit lane,…

There were audible gasps when design director Marek Reichman pulled the (extremely large) cover from Aston Martin Lagonda’s new concept car on press day at the 2009 Geneva motor show. The seen-it-all press corps had never seen anything quite like it – and soon let it be known that they weren’t terribly keen on what they saw. It hardly needs saying that this was an extremely bold statement from AML. And in the era of the DB9 and VHgeneration Vantage, too. The Lagonda was huge, brutal, a zillion miles away from those low, lithe, pretty sports cars. Which, of course, was very much the point. This was AML under Ulrich Bez looking for new customers and new markets – markets such as the Middle East, South America, India and China,…

Of all the Astons I’ve ever driven, the V600 Le Mans was never one to leave me thinking it needed more of anything. Least of all power. And yet, if there’s one thing that consistently captures our imagination as car enthusiasts, and fans of Aston flagships in particular, it’s the allure of machines with rampant brake horsepower. Appropriate, then, that during our visit to Stratton Motor Company to borrow the X-Pack and V550 for our cover story, Stratton’s Roger Bennington shared a secret project he’s been working on in collaboration with David Eales from Oselli Ltd. Better still, he tossed us the keys… Developed under the working title of Stratton Le Mans V700, it is, as its name suggests, a more potent evolution of the limited-edition Vantage Le Mans built…

Thirty-one issues into the life of this magazine, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’ve left it rather late to feature David Brown in the ‘Heroes’ slot. Truth is, we’ve always felt that his place in the Aston Martin story was almost too pivotal, his life too rich, to possibly do him justice in a single page. But the Heroes feature was never going to run forever, and it would have been perverse to end it without paying tribute to the man who did more than any other to create the legend that is Aston Martin. So here we are. The bones of the story you already know. Wealthy, Yorkshire-born industrialist; snapped up struggling Aston Martin and Lagonda just after the war; oversaw the creation of a string of world-class GTs;…

IT’S STRANGELY reassuring to think that, as I write, and as you read this story, 55 years after the last original DB5 left the production line, a team of extremely skilled craftspeople and engineers is once again building DB5s at Aston Martin Works in Newport Pagnell. Not any old DB5s either, but 25 replicas of Bond’s gadget-laden Goldfinger DB5; the Aston that began the marque’s enduring association with the world’s most famous secret agent. With each car taking some 4500 hours to complete, progress is necessarily painstaking. But since ‘Job 1’ was finished in July, several more customer cars are now in-build, with 20 cars expected to be completed by the end of the year. All will be finished in Silver Birch, and all will have the same, period-correct mechanical…

IT’S PROBABLY FAIR to say that the current Vantage hasn’t been universally loved for its looks since its introduction two years ago, and much of the negative reaction has been directed at its grille. Even Aston Martin itself has appeared to acknowledge that the standard ‘Hunter’ grille isn’t to all tastes by launching an alternative ‘vane’ grille as an option across the range (see Bulletin, issue 29). And now an independent aftermarket bodykit company has revealed its own solution with a retro-look nose treatment that steers the current Vantage back towards its VH-era predecessor. The design, by UK-based Revenant Automotive, divides the intake area into two distinct openings, with a traditionalstyle grille above a separate lower inlet protected with hexagonal mesh and connected to a splitter by a pair of…

AFTER A LENGTHY suspension of racing activities due to Coronavirus restrictions, the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) made a welcome return after a break of 174 days since the chequered flag fell at the Lone Star Le Mans held at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Hungry to resume racing, teams converged on a spectator-free Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium for Round 6 of the championship. For both Aston Martin Racing’s factory GTE Pro squad and independent partner team TF Sport, who have been contesting the GTE Am class, the disjointed season couldn’t re-start soon enough, with the former leading the championship and the latter just two points shy of the GTE Am leaders. AMR wasted no time in asserting itself over the opposition, with the team’s first front-row lockout…

email us eds@vantagemag.co.uk write to us Vantage Magazine Editorial, Dennis Publishing, 31-32 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP Team players In my interview by Peter Tomalin (Vantage issue 30) I regret I failed to give due recognition to the excellence and professional conduct of the engineering design team that Peter Sprague, George Minden and I were lucky enough to inherit in 1975. When I took the chair of the company, it became apparent to me they were the ‘jewel in the crown’, since they produced more than acceptable solutions to every question asked – witness the introduction of the Oscar India, the Volante and Lagonda, plus, of course, the creation of the one-off ‘Bulldog’. We could not have had a better workforce, sales team or engineering team. They all have my…

It’s a little-known cul-de-sac in Aston Martin’s history, but back at the turn of the millennium – when both Aston Martin and Land Rover were part of Ford’s glittering Premier Automotive Group – the pair collaborated on the development of a V12-engined SUV. The continuation of an earlier abortive project led by BMW engineering boss (and subsequent PAG boss) Wolfgang Reitzle, in which BMW’s V12 was shoe-horned into the extended nose of a Range Rover prototype, this time the Aston-powered machine received a heart transplant from a DB7 GT. Similarly cloaked in mystery, this wild yet prescient project was also canned. More’s the pity. Two decades later and Aston is finally grabbing headlines with its first SUV. Though not, it has to be said, one powered by a V12. Whether…

Before you ask, yes, it is a genuine Aston Martin. Among the many remarkable things about this sub-seven-second quartermiler is that 30 years ago it was originally conceived and built by Aston Martin Works Service in Newport Pagnell. Works chief Kingsley Riding-Felce had hatched a plan to demonstrate to the world the pace of the new 32-valve development of Aston’s V8, created for the Virage with the help of US tuner Callaway. To do this, Works would build a dragster clothed in a genuine all-aluminium Virage body – one of the model’s prototypes, in fact – and uprate the engine to 550bhp. But there was a problem: it still wasn’t fast enough to be competitive, so Works never ran it in public. Then the money ran out, the project was…

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t at all sure about the Callum Vanquish 25. Not so much because of the mechanical upgrades, many of which aim to address weaknesses that partly hobbled the original cars, but largely because I wasn’t comfortable with the looks of one of my alltime favourite Astons being meddled with. Of course, being the designer of the original gives Ian Callum more claim than anyone to return to what many, myself included, regard as his masterpiece. But why would he want to? And, having given it a nip and tuck, would it be palpably better, merely different, or look like a middle-aged man wearing the contents of his teenage son’s wardrobe? The answer comes as I walk into the Warwickshire HQ of R-Reforged, the engineering group responsible…

DESPITE THE RELEASE of the 25th Bond film, No Time To Die, being delayed until November due to the ongoing effects of the Covid pandemic, Aston Martin has kept the British end up with a pair of new 007 Edition models to celebrate the landmark movie. The first of the two models is the Vantage 007 Edition, inspired by the original Aston Martin V8 that made its 007 debut in The Living Daylights in 1987. Limited to 100 units worldwide and available with a manual or automatic transmission, each comes finished in Cumberland Grey and featuring knowing exterior and interior nods to Timothy Dalton’s classic V8. It can even be delivered with a set of The Living Daylights-inspired limited-edition skis and ski rack – referencing the ‘winterised’ V8 saloon from…

WITH A PRODUCTION RUN limited to only 64 cars, any V12 Vantage Zagato is a rare beast. But the example that has appeared for sale in the UK this summer is something very special even by usual Zagato standards. One of just two pre-production cars – built to tour the world as show cars for prospective clients at exclusive events – it’s the only one that was bodied entirely in aluminium rather than the carbonfibre/aluminium combo of every other example. Owned by Aston Martin itself up until 2016, the right-hand-drive Vantage had been due to go to Zagato to form part of the design house’s own collection. However, a keen Aston Martin collector – and the car’s only owner – persuaded the company to let him purchase it. Before it…

IN LAST ISSUE’S dispatch we mentioned that the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance had been called off. That announcement heralded the collapse of this summer’s entire Monterey Car Week. Unwelcome press releases were issued by one event after another, until there was nothing left on the calendar at all. In the scheme of things, the cancellation of a few car events barely qualifies as bad news. Still, there was plenty of gloom in the days that followed, until the mood was brightened by the folks at RM Sotheby’s, Bonhams and Gooding & Co, who promised online versions of the auctions that would, under normal circumstances, have taken place in Monterey. RM Sotheby’s rounded up three Aston Martins, all of which sold well, with bids predictably coming in a flurry in the…

‘As the dust settles on a dramatic and far-reaching management re-structuring, the stakes really couldn’t be higher’ Has a new Aston Martin ever carried such weight of expectation and responsibility as the DBX? Bedrock of Andy Palmer’s oft-quoted ‘Second Century Plan’ and catnip for City investors looking for a lucrative money-spinner to drive future share values, the DBX has long been central to the marque’s survival. That it’s also the most controversial model in the company’s history (save the short-lived Toyota-based Cygnet) only piles more pressure on Aston’s first foray into the hotly contested premium SUV market. As the dust settles on a dramatic and far-reaching management re-structuring that saw the sudden departure of Palmer, the stakes really couldn’t be higher. Bluntly, the DBX has to deliver. It’s with all…

V8 Vantage X-Pack ENGINE V8, 5340cc MAX POWER c430bhp @ 6500rpm MAX TORQUE c400lb ft @ 5000rpm TRANSMISSION Five-speed manual, rear-wheel drive, limited-slip differential SUSPENSION Front: double wishbones, coil springs, telescopic dampers, anti-roll bar. Rear: de Dion tube, trailing arms and Watt’s linkage, coil springs, telescopic dampers STEERING Rack-and-pinion, power-assisted BRAKES Vented discs, 292mm front, 264mm rear WHEELS 16in front and rear TYRES 255/50 R16 front and rear WEIGHT c1800kg POWER TO WEIGHT c245bhp/ton 0-60MPH 5.4sec TOP SPEED 170mph PRICE NEW £59,950 in 1987 (£177,000 in today’s money) VALUES TODAY £350,000-£425,000 DBS Superleggera ENGINE V12, 5204cc, twin-turbo MAX POWER 715bhp @ 6500rpm MAX TORQUE 663lb ft @ 1800-5000rpm TRANSMISSION Eight-speed automatic, rear-wheel drive, limited-slip differential, DSC, DTV torque-vectoring SUSPENSION Front: double wishbones, coil springs, adaptive dampers, anti-roll bar. Rear: multi-link,…

DBR1 replicas have become almost commonplace in recent times. And no wonder. With originals today worth tens of millions, there are plenty of people – including serious collectors – who covet an accurate copy of Aston Martin’s fabulous Le Mans winner. Replicas of the R1’s DBR2 bigger brother are like hen’s teeth by comparison, which is perhaps surprising. Although the R2 was structurally different – and also slightly larger in almost every dimension than the R1 – it was every bit as fabulous. And rather than the R1’s full-on race engine, the R2 was powered by the classic Tadek Marek straight-six that would soon appear in DBs 4, 5, 6 and S, so in theory it should be easier to create an authentic tribute. This is just such a car,…

ADB6 Mk2 with an automatic gearbox isn’t the first car you might choose to drive to the ends of the earth. But Robin and Charlotte Morrison have now completed not one but seven epic adventures in their Aston. Among those trips, it has taken them 18,000 miles to Sydney, Australia; 11,000 miles from Panama to Alaska; and 10,000 miles travelling the length of South America. Last year they undertook the most punishing trip yet – over 3000 miles through Central Asia on the route known as the Pamir Highway. So how did an apparently sensible middleaged couple and their 50-year-old Aston come to be tackling thousands of miles of some of the world’s most inhospitable driving terrain? The answer can be traced back to one of those life-changing moments. Back…