FREE HOT HD APPS & GAMES
FREE HOT HD APPS & GAMES
One, depress clutch. Two, start engine. Three, coax manual shifter into gear. Four, give throttle pedal “a bit of beans”, in the colourful parlance of Kevin Watters, product spokesman. Five, lift off clutch.
The V8 Vantage N24 prototype leaves the gravel shoulder and joins empty two-lane blacktop. Soon, very soon, the engine builds to a ripe, gargling agitation. Never mind the tachometer needle, which, arthritic from nine years of frenzied exercise, is stuck somewhere beyond 8,000rpm.
“The rev counter’s had a hard time,” Watters deadpans. “You’re best off ignoring it.”
Translated: upshift. Now.
With a Rorschach of insect guts and tire smudges across its nose, this hard-bitten racecar, nicknamed Rose by its developers, occupies the same bloodline as James Bond’s pristine DB5s and DBSs. That pert blue DB6 convertible driven by Prince William and Duchess Kate on their wedding day? Also a close relation. And the Rapide S super sedan? The one with doorsill-to-ceiling Alcantara trim, headrest-mounted multimedia screens and diamond-stitched leather seat bolsters? Kissing cousins.
Few brands, automotive or otherwise, can shoehorn so many ideas into one logo. That suppleness will be critical in Aston Martin’s second century, as the company works to balance its independence (ultra-luxury countrymen Bentley and Rolls-Royce have German corporate benefactors) with the imperatives of running a boutique transport business in the 21st Century.
An all-wheel-drive crossover is due by decade’s end. Turbocharged V8 engines, sourced from Mercedes-AMG, will help curb the CO2 emissions of Aston’s high-performance, often V12-powered machines. A new factory rumoured for the US, the first to be located outside Britain, would address demand from emerging markets such as Latin America and southeast Asia.
The challenge is to expand while maintaining the exclusive, contrarian and deeply British character that makes a prototype racecar named Rose – a veteran of the treacherous Nürburgring 24 endurance race in Germany – so magnetic.
Sitting trackside at the Nürburgring 24 in May, with Aston’s ultra high-net-worth demimonde watching Rose’s descendants in action, one senses the stakes; nobody wants their grand old brand to crash and burn, but neither do they want it smothering the starting grid like so many Porsches.
A tortoise gathers speed
For all their pace, Aston Martins don’t begin life in much of a hurry. At the company’s factory in Gaydon, roughly 145km (90 miles) northwest of London, a seamstress hand-stitches a leather seat cushion with brilliant yellow thread. A single technician epoxies a body panel to what will become a $300,000 Vanquish coupe. In a glass-walled annex, two engineers hunch over an otherwise empty table, inspecting an eight-speed ZF automatic transmission – one of few systems sourced from outside these walls. Backtracking a half hour later shows the seamstress still at work on the same cushion.
Aston sold about 4,000 cars in 2014, though spokespeople say Gaydon can accommodate production of over 10,000 vehicles. Ferrari constrains production at 7,000 cars annually, but is facing corporate pressure to increase its footprint. And while Ferrari and Aston Martin may breathe the same rare air, their fortunes diverge in the accounting office.
“Aston Martin has been profitable twice in its history and bankrupt seven times,” Andy Palmer, Aston Martin’s chief executive, says flatly. “We must, must adapt.” Since assuming the job in 2014, Palmer has put Aston on the march, fast-tracking the DBX crossover concept car, overseeing a £200m ($305m) investment round and floating the probability of an ex-UK production facility.
The imperative to adapt, and not cater to, in Palmer’s words, “just one type of buyer”, has gripped ultra-luxury carmakers particularly hard. Bentley, Maserati, Rolls-Royce and Lamborghini are all developing SUVs precisely because loyal customers have gone elsewhere to buy them. If Aston made a crossover or SUV, the thinking goes, affluent anglophiles would forego a trip to the Land Rover dealership.
“The fact that we have that reach, to exist on such a broad spectrum, it gives me confidence that we can stretch to cover other segments,” Palmer says. “That’s the kind of strength I think Aston Martin has.”
Of bang-shifts and beetles
For all its quirks, Rose is a straightforward machine. Add a handbrake, replace the Perspex windows with glass and reorient the headlights, and it would be road-legal in Europe. Despite this versatility, the car cannot transcend its nature.
Downshifting hard from third to second gear to shed speed before a bend, Rose swings her tail abruptly toward the median. In that mouth-drying instant, in that pregnant second of lost adhesion, Rose has illustrated the paradoxical allure of Aston Martins.
For all their evocations of debonair secret agents and tweedy royals, Astons can bare-knuckle a bend bloody. Credit the rear-wheel-drive architecture of every car in Aston’s lineup, which – combined with engines that sit aft of the front axle line – provide both wondrous balance and an equal capacity to lose it.
How such driving dynamics translate to an all-wheel-drive crossover is a topic of much conjecture. Palmer suggests that not only the production version of the DBX, but all forthcoming Astons will still be engineered for fleet, rarified mischief.
“Look, the Concorde wasn’t necessarily the most ergonomic or comfortable plane in the world, but it’s how I’d want to travel,” he says.
Countering Astons’ capacity for mile-munching pace is Q, Aston Martin’s customisation programme. Indeed, ultra-luxury cars are no longer exceptional on their own merits; they must be made even more special after the sale is made. At Q, owners pore over leather samples and wood veneers, and sometimes come with uncommon requests. A scarab’s iridescent shell so enthralled one Q customer that it was inlaid, like marquetry, into the badge of the client’s V12 Zagato:
Not all entomological whims are humoured by Q; Aston spokespeople note that the scarab, a popular motif in ancient Egyptian art, aligned with the company’s wing badge, designed in an art-deco Egyptian style in the early 1930s, at the height of tomb-raid fever. Absent that connection, the one-off project wouldn't have been done.
The home stretch
It is borderline perverse to call a 101-year-old company readying a$2.5m track monster called Vulcan an underdog. At the Nürburgring, however, Aston Martin Racing is dwarfed by Porsche, BMW and Audi. Even Toyota, which fields just a handful of racecars, dominates a verdant promontory above the circuit, its expansive white tent welcoming fans and privateer teams for drinks and hospitality.
Aston Martin exerts a softer kind of power.
Before the race, stewards grant the carmaker and its assembled VIPs an honorary lap of the 12.9-mile Nordschleife, the northern section of the circuit. Participants are instructed to drive on the right, granting Rose – yes, her again – a clear lane to overtake the 30-strong procession. At Rose’s wheel is Dr Ulrich Bez, former CEO and current chairman of Aston Martin, who at 72 continues to compete in the Nürburgring 24.
For 10 minutes, as the multimillion-dollar parade traces the circuit’s ebbs and inclines, there is no sign of Bez or Rose. Then, without warning, a yellow coupe, headlights blinking maniacally, assaults the procession’s left flank before disappearing round the next bend, trailing a smear of red light. Bez and Rose clearly still have much to give, and to prove.
The same might also be said of Aston Martin.
FREE HOT HD APPS & GAMES
FREE HOT HD APPS & GAMES
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