As far as positions in life go, being able to buy your very own Aston Martin Vantage isn't a bad one. You'll need around £90,000 to spend a day at the firm's Gaydon facility (which is, as of this month, where all Aston Martins will be built) choosing what colour and trim options you'd like, but that's half the appeal of this hand built GT car.

Stretch the budget by around £15,000 though, and that position suddenly becomes all the more appealing. And instead of choosing what stitching to have on your hide seats at Aston Martin Lagonda, you'll spend your day at Aston Martin Racing, located down the road at Prodrive in Banbury instead, deciding just how 'trick' your Vantage GT4 should be. A fully-stripped out road-racer developed by the men and women who used to tweak Colin McRae's Subaru rally cars, the Vantage GT4 is an impressive bit of kit.

Admittedly your £105,000 will only see you slotting beneath the roll cage bars of a track-spec Vantage GT4 rather than a campaign-worthy racer, but it's only your budget that limits your choice of specification. Spend around £140,000 and you'll be sat in the bucket seat of a full-blown racer, ready to campaign against the very best drivers and teams in whichever GT series you see fit to.

It doesn't matter how thick your wallet is though; whether it be the Sultan's latest Rapide or the gentleman racer's GT4 car they all start with the same ingredients. The architecture of Aston Martin's extruded aluminium chassis is used across the range (save for the Toyota-based Cygnet) and gets its strength from the adhesive bonding it together. Not content with this already impressive structure, Prodrive goes one step further, cementing its image as one of the most thorough in the business by painstakingly scraping off any excess adhesive by hand. Not only does it reduce weight, but it makes all the exposed areas of the chassis (mostly the cabin floor, normally covered by deep carpet) look sexier.
Spec your GT4 high enough, or have the means and desire to aim higher and buy a GT3 or GTE car instead, and they'll even cut away parts of the structure to make room for more focused components, often before being sent back to Aston Martin for the original bonding process. And if your pockets are deep enough, cars like the GT3 even have their engine pushed further down and back into the chassis for better weight distribution.

All the engines arrive on a pallet from Cologne, ready to be mated to a standard torque tube housing the carbon fibre propshaft, before being installed into the car. But Aston Martin Racing will spend another five to seven days extracting another 50hp from the 4.7-litre V8 in your GT4. It's mated to the same gearbox as the road car, albeit with slightly uprated gears and different software for the gearbox ECU, but for all intents and purposes this GT4 car uses the same drivetrain as the standard model. In its most basic form there's even the same traction control system, though the ABS is a race-favoured Bosch system whose intervention is adjustable from the driver's seat.

There are different levels of 'aero' on the Vantage GT4 as well, some of which is now found on the standard road car thanks to the crossover of information between the race and road car teams. From wider sills, through fewer vanes in the front grille to the extended rear wing it all serves its purpose of making the car quicker round a track. The attention to detail doesn't stop there either, as the rubber bushes in the suspension are replaced with rose joints and uprated springs and dampers used front and rear.

But it's not just about the car. While anyone with an ounce of knowledge could happily hop into the 'entry-level' GT4 racer and get it around a circuit, to get the best from it requires a certain amount of skill. And that's something Aston Martin Racing is happy to provide; dig deep again and it'll provide you with a perfectly tailored training scheme. Not only will it coach you through your race licence, but enter you and the car into GT4 test days along with factory support in the pit lane. Stick at it long enough and you can even enjoy turnkey support (for £20,000 per person based on two sharing a car) for a series of GT endurance races throughout the season.

Endurance is what's needed as well, as there's no way to hurry the process. Just like the hand-crafted road cars, these hand-built road-racers take time to be created; around six to eight weeks should see Aston Martin Racing deliver your bespoke Vantage GT4 ready and prepped for some serious circuit work. And it's then, just as you're about to slip out of the pit lane and drop the hammer for the first time, that your once appealing and pleasant position suddenly becomes truly enviable.

Graeme Lambert - 30 Aug 2012