First Aston drive? We’ll have the
fastest one, please
For a person who had never driven an Aston
Martin, I had rather a lot of opinions about them. In my estimation, they were
the most beautiful bunch of cars in production today (the Maserati Grancabrio
MC is, as we all know, the single-most beautiful car in the world, although the
Alfieri concept makes me want to punch a wall out of sheer lust)—the fact that
they all looked the same was irrelevant. They were also the best-sounding
series of cars in production today, although the Jaguar F-Type ran them close.
Aston
Martin's V12 Vantage S is a car that will really appeal to the true enthusiast
Astons were for gentlemen who hid a streak
of thug somewhere beneath their Brioni suit (a certain J. Bond comes to mind);
they were on the verge of becoming analogue anachronisms in a digital age, with
their old-world technology and lack of a myriad of safety nannies. These cars
appealed to me in a very fundamental way, and I had already decided that my
Aston debut would be a memorable one, whenever it happened. As things turned
out, I found myself behind the alcantara-lined wheel of the V12 Vantage S, the
fastest car that Ulrich Bez makes, save for the ultra-rare One-77; better yet,
before me was an utterly deserted stretch of winding road, somewhere in the
hills between Dubai and Oman, and nary a speed camera in sight. It was time to
do something rowdy.
Aggressive
bonnet vents hint at the monstrous powerplant underneath the Vantage's bonnet
When you’re in a car that is this powerful
and sounds this good, you don’t merely floor it and take off—no. You indulge in
a bit of foreplay before throwing yourself into the act, delaying your
gratification. You grip the steering wheel, the beginnings of a smile appearing
on your face. You run an appreciative eye over the ‘wrong way’ dials, which are
very cool. You wonder why on earth there’s a garish yellow stripe running down
the middle of the centre console (more on that later). You appreciate the
presence of a good, old-fashioned handbrake, simultaneously cursing its
intransigence.
Small
detail, such as the carbon fibre front grille, differentiates the V12 S from
its V12 forebear
You blip the throttle, your ears perking up
at the thick, juicy roar that bursts out of the pipes. Turning off traction
control, you rev the gargantuan engine to about 4,500 rpm and take your foot
off the brake, at which point the rear tyres spin helplessly on the hot tarmac
and you end up sideways, not having gotten very far. You stop guffawing, turn
TC back on, aim the car down the road and rev the hell out of it. You let go of
the brake. Bang. You’re gone, in considerably less than 60 seconds.
The sheer ferocity, the utter carnality of
this car’s 6.0-litre, V12, 557 bhp, 63 kgm engine is something that can’t
adequately be described; you have to sit in the car to experience it. Of
course, I could well be describing any other supercar in this regard, but the
Aston is special, its naturally aspirated powerplant producing the kind of
audio explosion that gets under your skin and stays in your ears while you’re
asleep at night. With my foot firmly planted on the accelerator, I was
manhandled by the g forces involved when a car accelerates from 0-100 kph in
3.7 seconds, and I enjoyed every second of that assault.
The
bellowing V12 makes a fantastic noise at full chat, yet it's sensibly
restrained at lower speeds
With the engine on the boil and the exhaust
noises bouncing off the hillsides (this car is LOUD, gloriously loud—did I
mention that?), I was in driving heaven. I found myself accelerating
unnecessarily hard down the short straights and out of corners, just to hear
the car’s full-throated symphony; in practice, the massive slabs of torque low
down in the rev range meant that all I had to do was leave the gearbox in third
and go for it. Every dab at the throttle produced a great big surge of
propulsion and a wall of raucous noise, and it was all I could do to not try
and verify the car’s 328 kph top speed. No, I won’t tell you how close I got to
that figure—I’d like to go back to the UAE some day.
