The new Aston Martin Vantage is shorter and hotter than the DB11: a smaller, truer sportscar, though slightly less elegant. ‘Gentlemanly’ is what the copywriter calls the DB11, but this is a ‘hunter’ and ‘predatory’. Ferraris, meanwhile, are a little too hot for me – though I accept that they are sublime, if Ferraris are your thing – and the Toyota Supra, which I love – even shorter, even hotter, much cheaper – doesn’t make quite the same impression on the A30. People (I mean men over 40) love Aston Martins. They view them as an expression of British pride, and coo over them like babies, by roaring past, overtaking, and slowing down, and then insisting you overtake them in turn. The whole encounter is managed by hand signals and engine snorts, and it is delightful.
This is the first new Aston Martin sportscar since the Vantage appeared in 2005 – the DB11 and the DBS Superleggera are grand tourers, and the Valhalla and the Valkyrie are eerie beasts, supercars not for the likes of us – which is big news for this column, even if James Bond, who peels mangoes for infants now, acts like a man longing for a Volvo and its peerless safety record. Nothing lasts forever. Still, there’s me.
This is the ‘baby’ – or the entry-level – Aston Martin (everything is relative). I have the coupe, and it is a beautiful monster. It is exquisite in looks, of course: but then I’ve never seen an Aston Martin that isn’t beautiful. (People who say the British are bad at decorative arts don’t notice our cars.) That’s why the King, who is all aesthetics – I have seen his gazebo – loves them. It’s all insinuating curves, like a cello, just made of bonded aluminium. The invocation of a woman’s body isn’t subtle, and it isn’t meant to be. This is a car for lying on, in and under: of course, James Bond met it in violence and lust before he got boring. (Cars have a fantastical ability to mirror.) The grille is expansive: the headlights are slender, and lovely; the interior is a room of your own with warmth and music, or not. It smells of – well, money. Just money.
It’s all insinuating curves, like a cello, just made of bonded aluminium. The invocation of a woman’s body isn’t subtle, and it isn’t meant to be
That’s the beauty: now for the monster. It’s inevitable – ironic, faintly heartbreaking – that, as we reach the end of petrol cars, they are closer than ever to perfection. If cars are art for men who don’t know they love art, now they are cursed by the certainty of losing it. Aston Martin has a deal with Mercedes – its ownership history is confounding, and this suits the fragility and poetry of the products, though I suspect accountants don’t get out of bed for metaphor alone – and this has produced a 4.0-litre twin turbo V8 engine, which will shoot from 0-60mph in 3.6 seconds, with a top speed of 195mph: a mad thing to squeeze into a two-door car.
Those are just numbers, of course, keystrokes, which give you nothing of the sensation of driving it. It’s childlike, I suppose, at least partially, and the rest I am afraid of: picked up and hurled dreamward, it is part lover, part parent, part friend. I always feel renewed in an Aston Martin, which, when asked, does as fair an impersonation of Verdi’s ‘Dies Irae’ as a car can manage. I cannot know if this sensation continues, as I have never owned one.
A glorious car then. It has other permutations – the F1 edition (sold out, they only made 333 of them) has a spoiler (a wing) on the back, which is for Kenickie Murdoch from Grease, not me, and you can have a V12 if you want to take off, but I don’t drive fast enough for it. But I can’t think of much, legal or not, I wouldn’t do for the V8 Roadster. I just configured one on the website – black like my soul, and Adrian Mole’s bedroom, there was no baby pink option – and though I was able to post my configuration on Facebook, they won’t tell me how much it costs unless I email them, at which point I will have to confess I am a fantasist.
Petrol cars are ebbing, as I said: you won’t be able to buy a new one after 2030, by which time I hope the experience of charging an electric car isn’t the same as the one I had at Land’s End yesterday, which was pre-fisticuffs near a Vauxhall Corsa in the rain. If you can afford an Aston Martin Vantage – it’s £130,000 and rising – buy one now, before they roar into history. Buy this one. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing should.
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