Re: [2018] Aston Martin Vantage
I'll post the last paragraph of what EVO UK (Steve Sutcliffe) thinks of the V12 Vantage:
At no point do you ever feel emotionally connected to the road below when driving the V12 Vantage, not even at nine-tenths.
Or at least I don't, and that's quite a sad admission to make after several hundred miles of trying quite hard to make a connection.
Especially when there's a big and theoretically charismatic twin-turbo V12 being conducted by your right foot, but then to be honest this particular V12 isn't one of the all-time greats.
Never has been. True, turbocharging has gifted it with immense amounts of power and torque, and there's that admirable absence of lag to go with this.
But without the right gearbox attached to it, some of that torque has had to remain in the suitcase on this occasion and this has diluted the subjectove performance, and by a surprising amount in the mid-range.
Scout's honour, the V12 Vantage doesn't feel or sound anywhere near as dramatic as I want it to between 30 and 70mph and beyond.
The benign responses of its gearbox in any of its modes do it few favours relative to the best competition, either.
Oh dear, maybe the dinosaur does buy it in the end, which is not how you'd want this story turn out at all.
Either way, the V12 Vantage doesn't feel like a car that's terribly happy with its own skin. It's too much of a thug dynamically to ever feel truly at one with on the road, yet - as you can read over the page - it's not sharp or fast enough on track to live with the best of the best, either.
It feels like something went oddly wrong with this car; not when they were designing it, because it looks beautiful, but when it was being engineered.
It feels like there might have been disagreements behind the scenes that never got resolved, and that the car itself is the unfortunate manifestation of such unease.
Whatever the truth of it, this is not one of Aston Martin's finest cars, which is nothing less than a tragedy, all things considered. Maybe it really is time to think differently from now on. And start all over again.
EVO Rating: 3.5 / 5
Henry is in better shape
