Aston Martin Vanquish

Aston Martin Vanquish Aston Martin Vanquish
First Drive Review

The mission of this car is to outrun the Ferrari 550 Maranello. Is that a tall order, or what? Car and Driver has heaped praise on the front-engined, two-seat Ferrari, and our editor-in-chief drove one to a world record by averaging 190.132 mph over a 100-mile distance (C/D, February 1999).

Comes now this new Aston Martin, due here next summer. Even its name indicates its ambition: Vanquish. Aston Martin is to its owner, Ford, as Ferrari is to its owner, Fiat -- a boutique where performance, style, and exclusivity outweigh practical considerations such as price or value for money. Not long ago, Aston was a very small-time producer, handcrafting hefty coupes and convertibles powered by an aging V-8 engine. The '97 DB7 has moved it into a different league, but total production is still only 1000 cars a year.

Now, under newly appointed chief executive Dr. Ulrich Bez, who has worked for BMW Technik, Porsche R&D in Weissach, and Daewoo, there is a plan for a third model. It should carry the price, if not the layout, of the Porsche 911. But before that, Aston has to recapture the high ground that it owned long ago. The big "V" cars, successors to the race-bred Astons of the 1960s, had become dinosaurs. They were banned from these shores because of their excessive emissions.

Project Vantage, unveiled at the '98 Detroit show, was designed to demonstrate how the traditional Aston could embrace modern technology. It had the 6.0-liter V-12 engine that has since been adapted for the DB7 Vantage, a paddle-shifting semiautomatic transmission, a chassis made of aluminum and carbon fiber, and another beautiful coupe body shaped by DB7 designer Ian Callum, the styling boss of both Jaguar and Aston.

After its enthusiastic reception in Detroit, Ford's bosses, keen to encourage Aston as a kind of research division to develop new technologies, sanctioned turning Project Vantage into a production prototype. There was one condition -- the exterior shape was to remain the same.

And so it is, although in practice, every panel and feature is slightly different. The cocktail of materials used for the body and chassis is the same as the one found in the concept car, but mixed differently.

Let's examine the chassis first. The main frame, floor, and bulkheads are made from interlocking and bonded-together beams of extruded aluminum, with the important addition of a center tunnel of carbon fiber forming a backbone, which is bonded to the hull. The aluminum structure is much like that of the Lotus Elise, so it is not surprising to find that the supplier, Hydro Automotive Structures, is the same, or that Lotus played an important part in the development of the Vanquish.

This immensely stiff and strong "tub" weighs 250 pounds. Steel subframes carry the engine and the front and rear suspensions. The body sides, including the door and window frames, are fiberglass preformed by resin transfer molding, but the A-pillars are carbon fiber woven by a spinning machine around a foam core and bonded into the aluminum frame. The larger skin panels are aluminum intricately shaped by the "superform" process, and the roof is stamped aluminum, bonded to the side members.

So this is not your traditional Aston with a locomotive chassis and alloy body shaped by hand and eye. The company likes to say the Vanquish is the most technically sophisticated car it has ever built. There is not much doubt about that. But in its quaint British way, the engine is described as "Stage 2" tune -- leaving the intriguing possibility of further development for a deliriously alliterative Vanquish Vantage at a later date.

For now, Stage 2 means 450 horsepower, 36 more than the DB7 Vantage's output, thanks to a lighter valvetrain, new camshafts, a stronger but lighter crankshaft, different intake manifolds, and attention to the electronics. Getting the control computers for the 12-cylinder engine and its drive-by-wire throttle, the robotized Tremec six-speed gearbox, and the ABS and traction control to work in concert was one of the more formidable aspects of this car's development.