Styling
We must confess, when we first saw pictures of the latest Vanquish, we were a little underwhelmed. Not, you understand, that it was an ugly car in any way, shape or form; no, more that it looked a lot like the DB12 and the
DB11 and the
DBS Superleggera, a car that (indirectly) the Vanquish must replace. But if, like us, you were a Doubting Thomas, then give the Vanquish time. You only need spend a few minutes in its company to begin to really appreciate what stunning presence this thing has.
It sits on the same aluminium-bonded chassis technology as a
Vantage or DB12, but it has an 80mm stretch of the wheelbase compared to the latter, all of which is in the zone between its front axle and the base of the windscreen. This results in a carbon-fibre side panel, complete with strake and 'V12' logo, that sits across the doors and front wing. At the front is a radiator grille 13 per cent bigger than that on the old DBS 770 Ultimate, for better cooling of said V12, while the bonnet is heavily contoured and vented. At the back is the 'Shield', the floating panel framed by seven-bar LED taillights which sits above quad exhausts and a huge diffuser, and then there are some glorious 21-inch forged alloys bolted into the arches for maximum effect. Muscular haunches, flowing design lines to break up the flanks... honestly, the Vanquish is a stunning-looking thing.
Interior
The inside of the Aston Martin Vanquish isn't quite as resounding a success as the exterior. Now, you're probably squinting at the pictures and thinking 'but it doesn't look
that bad in there'. And it isn't. The leather used on the supportive, comfortable seats is luxurious, everything feels solidly put together, there's a nice mix of materials and textures, and the technology is no longer old Mercedes cast-offs from the mid-2010s, with crisp, easy-to-use 10.25-inch screens used for the central infotainment and the digital driver's display. It's a big step on from where Aston's interiors were
only a few years back, no doubt.
But when we come onto the Value section later on in the review, the exorbitant price tag of the Vanquish comes to bear. And, frankly, we still think this interior is a bit safe and underplayed for this rarefied sector of the market; even the outgoing
Bentley Continental GT has a cabin which knocks spots off the Vanquish's for both craftsmanship and a bit of showmanship, and that only cost anything like as much money if you really, really tried with the options/personalisation choices. The central screen, as we've said, is OK, but it doesn't scream 'top-end tech', and neither does the instrument cluster either. All told, the Aston's cabin is fine, and it has some real high points like the solid feel of the mode-control dial or those paddle-shifts for the transmission, but it doesn't perhaps come across as the sort of knockout interior you'd expect for a huge amount of expenditure on the car in the first place.
Practicality
It's a conscious decision by Aston, but the Vanquish is a pure two-seater. A sensible enough move, because the rear seats in 2+2 GTs are often laughable and inaccessible to adults, so why bother with them in the first place? But if you're going to do away with the chairs altogether, perhaps a more usable stowage space back there would have been better than the strange, shelved bulkhead which is what you get. This couples to a tiny boot of 248 litres, and it's a load-bay that gets mighty hot if you start driving the Vantage fast (trust us, we know, as our luggage felt cooked when we took it out of the boot at the end of the test drive). So it kind of depends on how you view the Vanquish from the outset: if you focus on the 'Super' part of its made-up 'Super Tourer' name that Aston gives it, then two roomy seats, a smattering of useful in-cabin storage and a boot that should take a suitcase or two are probably more than enough on the practicality stakes; but if you think a 4.85-metre-long car that could easily just be called a GT ought to have some genuine GT versatility, you might reckon the Vanquish falls short of requirements.
Performance
This is an area where we - nor anyone else of sound mind - could have any possible concerns about the Aston Martin Vanquish. While a 5.2-litre V12 biturbo configuration is the same as the old DBS 770 had, the only things the motor in the Vanquish shares with its predecessor are the bore, the stroke and the vee-angle. Everything else is new, but whatever Aston's engineers have been cooking up, the results are jaw-dropping. The new Vanquish makes 835hp at 6,500rpm, backed up by fully 1,000Nm of torque smeared across a 2,500-revs-wide plateau. In a car which weighs a relatively low 1,774kg (that's dry weight, but still), the on-paper stats are thoroughly daunting, and yet simultaneously they only tell a small part of the story. Nevertheless, this Aston can do 0-62mph in 3.3 seconds and 214mph flat out, if you want the bare basics.
They're not enough on their own to convey just how seriously, searingly, sensationally quick the Vanquish is, though. It's an absolute animal. It feels ludicrously strong everywhere from near-standstill until it's deep into three figures, and that counts even in an age when mega-power EVs dole out enough torque from 0rpm to start an earthquake. Like any of the ultra-fast cars in the world, the difference between the Vanquish and most 500-600hp stuff is how it can still pile on enormous speed when accelerating from 60mph upwards - with enough outright grunt to shove you violently back in your seat as it does so.
With minimal turbo lag, the fast-acting and super-slick eight-speed transaxle gearbox, and a 325-section pair of Pirelli P Zeros on the driven wheels, the performance in the Vanquish is without foible; indeed, for a two-wheel-drive car, its traction is little short of otherworldly. But perhaps better than the sheer speed of the thing is the fabulous noise it makes. You need the Aston in either Sport or Sport Plus for the best tunes, but once you've done that then you get angry muttering from the V12 up to about 3,000rpm, before the note transforms into a furious snarl through the midrange and then, finally, crescendos with a near-motorsport yowl at the redline. What's so fantastic about this is that even the slightest flexes of your right ankle overlay the merest levels of acceleration with a rich, menacing V12 rumble, so - somehow - the Vanquish manages to sound even faster than it actually is. Which is very, very,
very fast indeed.
And fuel economy? Ah. Well, there's no hybrid gear here, nor clever cylinder deactivation. With all that torque on tap and a long final drive possible with the eight-speed 'box, Aston Martin reckons you might get 20.7mpg out of it as an average. Not very likely; we (and another journalist) enjoyed its charms for a good portion of our 170-mile test route, but also drove it sensibly in towns and on motorways... and we saw 12.4mpg. Oof. Still, if you can afford to purchase an Aston Martin Vanquish in the first place, you can sure as eggs is eggs afford to run an Aston Martin Vanquish, no matter how fast it is drinking through Super Unleaded.
Ride & Handling
On the one hand, things get better and better for the Vanquish in this department, because this is the best, most rewarding and sharpest Aston Martin we've yet driven. It's not supposed to be an out-and-out sports car, as the Vantage has that base covered, but the involvement levels of the Vanquish are immense for the keener driver.
With the gearbox mounted on the back axle, the weight distribution of the Aston is 51:49 front-to-rear, while an electronic limited-slip differential, double-wishbone front suspension, Bilstein DTX intelligent adaptive dampers and a carbon-ceramic brake system provide the hardware to attempt to corral the mammoth outputs of the V12 on the roads.
And it all works. Beautifully. Never has a two-wheel-drive super-GT like this been as approachable as the Vanquish. Slight squirms and squiggles from the rear axle under full throttle in the dry suggest provoking the big Aston in the wet might well be a fool's errand, but if the car has grip and traction (and it has plenty of both on warm asphalt) then you don't need to treat the accelerator like there's a Fabergé egg underneath it. You can lean on the Vanquish's chassis and push the edges of its talent without ever feeling like you're about to have a massive off.
It's quite sublime in this regard, aided and abetted by lucid, gorgeously weighted steering (in Sport and Sport Plus modes) that's immediate and eager, yet never hyperactive. Coupled in with exceptional wheel and body control, it all adds up to a large GT with a stonking great engine that feels neatly folded into the recipe, rather than the combustion unit instead being an all-dominant taste in the final product. We've honestly rarely driven anything ever with more than 700hp that's as unintimidating but also as thrilling as this. It's a genius piece of chassis engineering to balance those two opposing traits off so well.
Where the Vanquish is not quite so hot is as a GT. It feels like the dial has been nudged a little too far towards 'sport' and away from 'comfort'. This, though, is specifically in GT mode, where the car is supposed to be at its most supple and accommodating. Strangely, we found this set-up rather 'meh'. Large expansion joints in the tarmac sent a loud and harsh bang through the Aston's superstructure, while it never felt truly settled at town speeds, always fidgeting about. There's quite a bit of tyre noise on rougher surfaces from the fat P Zeros on the back axle and, worse still, both the steering and the throttle response go completely slack in GT - the former becoming overly light and feel-free, the latter requiring about 50 per cent openings just to get the turbos on the V12 to wake and fire the car forward with any meaning.
If the GT mode is there, it should have offered more light and shade when compared with the body and wheel control of the Vanquish in Sport and Sport Plus. A better solution would have been to give GT a sharper throttle than it has and steering with a bit more heft, but to make the dampers even softer than they are as now. Happily, there are two things that save the Vanquish for ride and rolling refinement: one, it's by no means bad in GT spec, it's just a touch too fuzzy around the edges for an 835hp special like this; and two, you can actually solve many of the ride issues by keeping it in Sport mode, where it remains firm-edged for comfort but more responsive in all of its actions, so weirdly it comes across as more pleasurable than running the Aston in GT.
Value
There's no getting around this - the Vanquish is going to cost from £330,000, and that's before you've got to any of Aston's individualisation options. When a DB12 kicks off at £185,000 and offers much of what the Vanquish can do for a huge chunk less cash, that price for the new boy looks ballsy in the extreme. Of course, the Vanquish is up against the likes of the
£336,500 Ferrari 12Cilindri, so it doesn't seem so extreme then, but this all brings us back to that interior, which we're of the opinion isn't quite opulent enough for something costing the same as a tidy three-bed flat in Harrogate.
Still, let's give the Aston one more feather in its cap: one of the features of the generous standard equipment list is a thumping great Bowers & Wilkins 15-speaker sound system with 1,170 watts of power. It's also a core part of the design within, its grilles being the focal part of the door-card styling, while the tweeters and centre speaker are the only things which break the upper line of the dashboard, save for the instrument binnacle.
Verdict
Even though it has a shorter-than-you-think heritage and a back catalogue that's perhaps not quite as glittering as we all remember it, using the 'Vanquish' nameplate again was always going to be a risk for Aston Martin, certainly if the resulting car didn't feel special enough or different enough to the DBS, DB11 and DB12 source material of the recent past. But you can stop fretting - apart from some slight concerns about the glitz of its interior, the brittleness of its GT-mode ride and it's less-than-stellar practicality, in all other respects the new Vanquish is a mesmerising bit of kit. Outrageously fast, stunning to behold, a joy to listen to and an unmitigated delight to drive on the right roads, would it be mental of us to say it's something of a bargain at 330 grand? It would? Oh well. We're mental, then. Phenomenal car.
