Advantage: Aston

Somehow, a 4.4km long, 18-corner track that is good enough to be an official FIA-endorsed back-up venue for Formula One pre-season testing, has been built down and, hence, serviced by, one of the shonkiest, most rutted access roads in all of Western Europe. Even the obligatory stray dogs look a bit embarrassed.

It’s very odd. I want to say the only signage for the place is a crudely hand drawn arrow on an ice cream container lid staple-gunned to a lamppost. But that’s not entirely true. There is signage, it’s just extremely minimal. And as for that narrow, overgrown, potholed access road… imagine threading a low slung, box fresh sportscar wearing 21-inch forged alloy wheels down it. I can feel you wincing from here.

Mind you, there’s a reason Aston Martin have had the world’s motoring media fetch up here in the dusty rolling hills of Huelva Province. And that’s the track itself. It’s excellent, combining all manner of corner configurations and, allegedly, one of the longest main straights in Europe: a 960m strip of tarmac that provides the perfect straight-line playground for foot-to-floor acceleration and – this being the V8 Vantage – brutal sonic mayhem from its quad exhaust system.

It turns out Aston Martin is going through a bit of a shift. Whereas until recently the emphasis has been on ‘luxury’, the desire to show its chops as a true performance icon is now becoming more of a focus.

Partly an extension of the brand’s F1 campaign and its ambitions in endurance racing with the Valkyrie AMR, partly the result of the serious take-no-prisoners energy that executive chairman Lawrence Stroll has brought to the British carmaker, Aston Martin wants to be a genuine rival for the leading edge sportscar brands. Think less Rolls-Royce and Bentley in the bullseye, more Ferrari and Lamborghini.

And here’s the first weapon in the war. The new Vantage V8.

The Vantage nameplate can be traced back to 1950, when it was first used to denote an uprated engine package for the DB2. In 1964 a high-performance Vantage-badged version of the DB5 became the new flagship of the range. Then, in the early ‘70s, a standalone Vantage model was introduced, from which point the badge has played an increasingly prominent role in Aston Martin’s model line. Until the advent of the DBX, the Vantage was top of the sales charts.

Circling back to those performance car ambitions, it’s perhaps unsurprising to learn the new Vantage is the fastest ever and, says the manufacturer, the most driver-focused yet.

The car’s 4.0-litre V8 twin turbo engine delivers 489kW and 800Nm of torque, representing a 15 percent increase in torque and a whopping 30 percent increase in power. How have they managed this? Engine enhancements include modified cam profiles, optimised compression ratios, larger turbos, and increased cooling which pushes 50 percent more air into the engine than the previous model (the grille is wider to help with cooling as well).

The Vantage has had to have an entirely new ZF gearbox fitted because of the upswing in torque. The new car also sees the addition of an Electronic Rear Differential (or E-Diff) which works in conjunction with the car’s Electronic Stability Program (ESP) to beef up available traction and provide consistency when it comes to handling and agility when a lot is being demanded of it.

That ESP system is also all-new and is continually checking pitch, yaw, throttle, and steering inputs. If the system detects the driver isn’t in full control of the car, it will deliver its own micro inputs via the E-Diff.

The Vantage’s suspension has been retuned and is now equipped with intelligent Bilstein Active Dampers that offer a range of control and response speeds, depending upon what drive modes have been engaged.

While the need for ever greater surges of power is apparent, Aston Martin hasn’t scrimped on changes to the Vantage’s interior over the previous model. Indeed, for the first time in a long time, you won’t see switchgear inside the cabin that has been brought over from engineering partner Mercedes-AMG. This is all now bespoke to the British carmaker, as is the new 10.25-inch touchscreen display and infotainment system.

There are natural similarities between this interior and that of the DB12 which launched last year. But get this: because the driver sits 10mm lower in the Vantage than in the big GT, Aston’s engineers have repositioned all the driver controls and displays downwards to compensate. That’s attention to detail.

There are no grandstands at Circuito Monteblanco. An immaculate pit area, yes. But no seating, no concession stands, no nod to adoring race fans of any stripe: it’s all business. A reminder of the big (racing) business Aston Martin is now engaged with comes when assembled motoring scribes are led out onto the track for preliminary sighter laps by none other than the ‘Podium Green’ official F1 safety car.

Aston reckons that the move into Formula One has been so successful as a branding exercise that its trad hero colour of Silver (indelibly linked with the DB5, naturally) has now been surpassed in the order books by the metallic ‘Podium Green’ shade as worn by the open wheelers of Alonso and Stroll.

With a handful of familiarisation laps complete and the sleek safety car back in pit lane, the training wheels are off and we’re let loose on the circuit for a very generous number of solo laps, all greedily gobbled up.

And what you learn immediately is that the new Vantage is very good at going, and it’s very good at stopping.

Fire up the V8 and you’re already in ‘Sport’ mode in the Vantage: no point having a ‘Normal’ or ‘GT’ mode here because that’s not what this thing is about. From there, you progress up through ‘Sport+’, ‘Wet’, ‘Track’, and ‘Individual’ modes (preset today to give assembled media what Aston’s own engineers feel is the right mix of dynamic ride, handling, and steering settings).

I stick with ‘Sport’ for the first handful of laps and leave the car’s gearbox in auto mode: so good is Aston Martin’s performance-tuned gearbox that the days of even a track drive necessitating the switch to manual paddles seems superfluous when you’ve got an unfamiliar track layout to learn. Focus on one thing at a time.

For all the digital wizardry, the Vantage still feels pleasingly analogue. The throttle-feel progressive and squeezable; the electronic power steering precise but not in a nervy, confidence-ebbing way; the rear just a little bit scrabbly on an exit but always reigned in. Move to ‘Individual’ mode, with its mix of track-set throttle and ‘Sport+’ ride, and the car becomes more playful again, slightly looser, the exhaust note more deeply raucous.

With its top speed of 325km/h in mind, that big, long main straight beckons.

Even with the better part of a kilometre to play with, you need to be on the gas immediately out of the right-hander that feeds into the straight. Opening the taps on the Vantage will have you swooping up on the 200m brake marker board quickly regardless. Spoiler alert: I didn’t get anywhere near the threes (I saw 230-something the one time I dared look down at the instruments and that was good enough for me).

Flat flooring it lap after lap and – almost as impressive as the punch of acceleration – is the way the optional carbon ceramic brakes bit in and didn’t let go. The stopping power is immense and pleasingly consistent, with Aston citing reduced brake fade at up to 800°C and a 27kg weight saving in unsprung mass as a couple of plus-points for selecting these over the (presumably still very competent) standard cast-iron discs.

The venue for our track drive came as something of a surprise amidst the dusty semi-rural, semi-industrial Badlands west of the bustling, pretty laneways and soaring, historic clocktowers and spires of Seville.

Contrastingly, that Aston Martin has managed to re-engineer its flagship road racer into something even more refined and potent than ever before – and yet still give it all the cosseting goodness of a well-mannered modern sportscar – isn’t at all unexpected.

Aston Martin has a new lease on life. New energy. And in its ambitions to push to the edges of the performance car envelope, the Vantage is a most thrillingly assured move in that direction.