2014 Aston Martin Vanquish vs. The Hocking Hills

2014 Aston Martin Vanquish vs. The Hocking Hills 2014 Aston Martin Vanquish vs. The Hocking Hills
Instrumented Test From the July 2013 Issue of Car and DriverTESTED

After 250 miles of Monday, enduring exactly what most people expect of Ohio—dead-flat, straight pavement overpopulated with vigilant traffic enforcers—the sight of state highway 664 rolling into view through the windshield comes as a reward for good behavior. The kind of road that promises a workout, Route 664 slithers south out of Logan, carrying us toward the Hocking Hills and Car and Driver’s Midwestern driving roads of choice.

By the time we’ve made the turn at the Lazy W airport, a Nissan Altima looms in the mirror, striving to catch up to our 2014  Aston Martin Vanquish, the brand’s elaborately detailed top-holer. Its driver tries to snag a cellphone pic, a mission that’s distracted many others during our five-hour slog from Ann Arbor. Cobalt-blue paint draws them like bees to roadside wildflowers. We’ve grown weary of the game, not to mention nervous about protecting this $300,000 car’s carbon-fiber bodywork from those charmed into inattentiveness.

Car and Driver Loop Other great roads are nearby, but decades of testers have settled on this repeatable loop as a go-to automotive fitness center. It exercises a car the way a racetrack does, but runoff room is scant, as an NSX driver once learned on the spur north on 374 near Conkles Hollow.

A right-thumb poke at the S button low on the rectangular steering wheel (a $1020 option patterned after that on the limited-edition Aston One-77) puts the transmission into sport mode, and a bit of throttle turns sixth into third. The V-12 supplies a good amount of its 565 horsepower, and the Nissan disappears from the rearview mirror as expected.

Insert the sapphire-glass key fob into a slot in the middle of the dash. Press it home. It glows red and the V-12 fires with a quick surge of revs. Adding a bit of theater, the car powers its folding exterior mirrors outward, the nav display emerges from the dashtop, and, if you’ve parked with the Bang & Olufsen audio system still on, the tweeters rise. We turn onto Route 374.

“The driving route is maybe the best in the world, this side of the Nürburgring,” says our John Phillips. “But you have to tackle it in the morning on weekdays to avoid traffic and school buses. Cops are few.”

Car and Driver has used this loop since at least 1989. It’s less than 14 miles according to Google Maps, a bit shorter than the Nord­schleife, making it useful for repeat runs to evaluate a car’s behavior or for back-to-back comparisons. It’s an open public road with two stop signs that only a criminally dangerous idiot would consider running, one of them in the heart of the small town of South Bloomingville. Wrapping as it does around the Hocking Hills State Park, curb cuts are few, but there are occasional driveways to inns and lodges and several park entrances. It’s great road, but it’s no racetrack.

We never quite get used to the four glass buttons (P, R, N, D) across the center of the dash that engage the Vanquish’s six-speed automatic, but we grow accustomed to looking at the rearview camera to supplement sightlines obstructed by the thick C-pillars when backing up.