Aston Martin V12 Vantage
We all know the way the hotel star grading system works: 1 Star Hotels are akin to staying in a Peruvian prison €” they would be an ideal place to stay if you are a drug mule and you wondered what life would be like if you were ever caught with 10 kilograms of cocaine shoved some place. Then there are 5 Star Hotels, they have all of the luxuries any human would ever need, ranging from a juggling monkey on roller-skates and views of Venus, to a nightly turn down service from a supermodel made entirely from Swiss Chocolate. Those are the two extremes of the spectrum, then slap bang in the middle there is the 3 Star Hotel.
These hotels don’t mind providing a little luxury so long as it is always coupled with some form of irritation. There is never an obvious button to turn off the fan which sounds like a Harrier Jump Jet, there are 88 different light switches that turn off all the lights except for the one above your bed, the plug socket is always behind the bed or behind the enormous, overpriced minibar and the tea and coffee that is provided was probably purchased from the same Peruvian prison that all the 1 Star Hotels are trying to emulate. In these hotels you get the feeling that they tried to make it a nice place to stay but they ended up doing a half ass job and now they don’t really care to improve it.
That is exactly the same feeling I got when I drove the Aston Martin V8 Vantage. It is a drop dead gorgeous car from the outside but the interior borrowed too much from a Volvo (who owned Aston at the time) and Volvo are hardly the people that I would go to for advice on building an interior of a car, Bentley or Rolls Royce yes, but Volvo? Then when you put the key in the ignition and bought the car to life the V8 produced the most spectacular sound I have ever heard, this gave me hope but unfortunately the 4.3l V8 did not produce enough power to move the car at the pace that it looked like it could achieve. What Aston had done with the V8 Vantage was design a 3 Star Hotel, they tried to make it great and then they got bored and lazy and the Vantage ended up being pretty to look at but dreary to drive. They then released a bigger 4.7l V8 which solved some problems but not all.
Now however, Aston have decided to get up from behind their concierge desks (the ones with the fish tanks behind them) and get working once again. They decided to throw away the V8 and simply put the mighty 6l V12 from their DBS model in the tiny little body of the Vantage. That is like taking a 40 kilogram woman and giving her double D breast implants €” as you can imagine, the results are as dramatic as naked mud wrestling with a porcupine.
What is brilliant is that Aston have kept the same beautiful body however, now there are 4 hideous vents on the bonnet (which is like Charlize Theron with an eyebrow ring and a bolt through her septum). The interior is pure style with some extra style sprinkled on top, although there is still a Volvo SatNav system to put up with. The thing is, is that you will not care about any of these little draw backs because Aston has transformed the Vantage into a knife-edge racer and you will not be able to take your eyes off the road because everything will be coming toward you in a big hurry.
Thanks to that enormous engine producing 380kw the Vantage now accelerates to 100km/h in 4 seconds and the standard carbon ceramic brakes will slow things down when they start to get a bit scary. The suspension is harder too, which confirms that this car is no longer a GT car it is definitely not a cheaper alternative to the DBS, it is a completely different animal. The problem is that now it has to compete with the likes of the Ferrari 430, the Lamborghini Gallardo, the Audi R8 V10 and the Porsche 911 Turbo. You might think that Aston does not have what it takes to compete with those cars, you might think that Aston are out of their depth and that they should rather stick to the slower, more comfortable Grand Tourers, but such thinking is the same as Hitler thinking that he could conquer the world with an army of blonde haired, blue eyed pretty boys its wrong. Its up there with the best of them and best of all it has an Aston Martin badge which is the same as having 500 litres of sophistication and cool stuck to the bonnet.
Aston have entered the super sexy, super-fast, supercar world in the super stylish way that only Aston could pull off. They have taken The Shady Pines Country Inn€ and turned it into the Ritz-Carlton.
