FIRST LOOK- New 656bhp Aston Martin Vantage + 200mph V600 Le Mans

656 brake horsepower. That is what you find under the bonnet of this, the new Aston Martin Vantage. But the idea of taking an existing Vantage and then rinsing a colossal amount of power out of it, well, that's not new to Aston Martin at all. So we'll take a good look at this 2024 revamp in a moment. But before that, let me take you back to 1998, when this, the prehistoric Aston Martin V8 Vantage, was not long for this world. Safety and emissions legislation, nothing new, had caught up with it. And its 5.3 litre V8, which could trace its roots back to 1969, the same year as man first walked on the moon. So to send it off, Aston Martin decided to turn this into a rocket. The Aston Martin engineers decided to see what would happen if they fitted not one, but two superchargers to the engine. And what happened was a giant leap in power, where the 1992 base car had developed just 350 horsepower. Now you've got 550. But they weren't finished. For £34,000 on top of the 200 grand asking price, customers could purchase something called V600 specification, which did exactly what it said on the tin. The Vantage was taken back to the factory and re-emerged with 600 horsepower and 600 pounds feet of torque. And you're thinking, nah, doesn't sound like much. You've got to remember, spoiled people of the 21st century, that at the time this thing was around, the most powerful car, the fastest car in the world, was the outrageous McLaren F1. It had 627 horsepower. Even hyper-exotic stuff like the Jaguar XJ220, the Gatti ED110, they were down in the mid 500s. And yet here you had a small group of guys at Aston Martin stuffing 600 horsepower under the bonnet of an old war horse. The final 40 V600s were treated to Le Mans specification. This added upgraded AP racing brakes, stiffer anti-roll bars, Koni shock absorbers, and luxuries like thicker wool carpets, heated seats, and weirdly, a bigger rev counter. When I had my first big book of supercars as a kid, I remember staring at the page that had one of these on for ages. Just because of this front, the blanked off V600 nose with these twin Warthog nostrils, just looked like such a thug. Oh, that is comfy. This was a two-ton coupe, stuffed with sheep, cow, and forest. But thanks to being able to go from nought to 60 in first gear, it would do that in 3.9 seconds. It'd get you to 100 in less than 10 seconds. And Aston Martin claimed it would do 200 miles an hour flat out. I mean, for its day, this was every bit as preposterous and wild as a Valkyrie is now. And I just love it. Right down to its tape deck and its Ford Crown Victoria steering wheel. Wow, what a thing. However, I shall now tear myself away from my boyhood hero, because it has a modern successor, doesn't it? From the old to the new, stupidly powerful Aston Martin Vantage. What Aston's tried to do here is the same sort of treatment that successfully worked on the DB12 when it was being evolved from the DB11. Loads more poke under the bonnet, loads better tech in the cabin, sharper looks, but also more of an edge to the drive. And the timing is spot on because there's that new AMG GT on the scene and Porsche is about to facelift the 911 Turbo. The British need a comeback. Please note, new more swept back matrix LED headlights, massive grille, because this thing needs 50% more cooling than the previous Vantage. And look, it's all real. I can officially report to you, there's no fake mesh nonsense going on here. That's real. This is real. So are the vents in the bonnet. There's obviously a family resemblance to the DB12, but because this is shorter overall and 30 mil wider across the back than the old Vantage, yeah, it's got a different character about the look of it. Should we do the James Bond analogy now? Get it over and done with? Yeah. If the DB12 is Pierce Brosnan, this is Daniel Craig. Same suit, but more hench. And speaking of the muscle, let's have a look at some proper ones, shall we? Under here, this is where the shopping list has really gone to town. We have new turbos, bigger turbos. We have more cooling, of course, new cams, but also interesting paperwork, I promise, because Aston Martin has revised its agreement with AMG. So rather than just taking their four litre twin turbo V8 from the Germans wholesale, they can now tune it how they want. And that means we've gone from 503 brake horsepower to 656 with 590 foot pounds of torque. Now that's been mapped in every single gear to give you some interesting torque curves and frankly make you want to chase that red line. It still all goes to the rear wheels. I mean, the baby Aston Martin now has more power than a 911 Turbo S, for now, more than its nearest AMG rival, more than a Ferrari Roma. It is an amount of poke that its granddad would be well proud of. They're claiming nought to 60 in 3.4 seconds and a 202 mile per hour top speed with faster shift speeds from the eight speed automatic gearbox promised along the way. Now that's just as well because the Vantage always slurred its shifts. It just wasn't as crisp as a dual clutch. And in the market it was competing in, that was a weakness. Meanwhile, this one's body has been stiffened hugely with new struts between the front suspension towers, the rear suspension as well and stiffer panels on the under tray. That means that Aston can take advantage of new clever adaptive dampers which should mean not just better handling overall but a wider spread of abilities between the various modes and crucially, gnarlier performance on track. They've also adjusted the steering calibration and stiffened the steering mounts and from driving the DBS 770 Ultimate last year which also had upgraded steering, that should be very good news for the Vantage. Lastly, before we jump inside, these are bespoke tyres for the new Vantage. That's why it says AML on the sidewall, Aston Martin Lagonda and in here you have carbon ceramic brakes although I'm surprised that these are an option. Standard, you get steels but I think I would want the carbon ones given the amount of power this has got and they save 27 kilos in unsprung weight. I reckon when they turn this into the F1 safety car, that box will get ticked. They've also cribbed a trick from the Mercedes-AMG GT-R and it's ratcheted eight-stage traction control. So by twisting a knob inside, you can tailor, well, how sideways you'd like to go before the car tries to save your bacon. Hold it right there. Do not come another step closer if you are the owner of a current or now old Vantage because once you have a look at this, you might spontaneously combust with jealousy. The interior of the old Vantage was its weak spot, I think. It was nice in that it was button-focused and it wasn't covered in touchscreens but the infotainment that they'd borrowed from Mercedes was so dated, it made the V600's radio look cutting edge and the whole thing was pretty fussy. It was difficult to find what you wanted to press and in a couple of areas, it didn't feel expensive enough to be worth 140, 150,000 pounds. This one needs to feel more expensive because it is. This is now 165,000 pounds. This one enjoys the same upgrades we saw in the leap from DB11 to DB12. The in-house Aston Martin-only touchscreen, a new steering wheel with gorgeous slender paddle blades which now turn with the wheel instead of staying stubbornly on the column like in a Ferrari and for the first time in a generation, a Vantage has a glove box. So we must have about half the number of buttons in here than we had before but good that we still have got proper buttons for things that you might want pretty regularly. Really like the new steering wheel and behind it, much more comprehensive instrument screen than you used to get in a Vantage. I like that they've raked this section of the center console, this quite Porsche-y bit backwards so it feels a bit more driver-focused than it does in the DB12 but overall, it just feels like a much more bespoke and thorough job in here from a company that is now at last on the up and up. Now, unlike that new AMG GT where they've squeezed some token back seats in to steal Porsche 911 buyers, they've not bothered in here. Strict two-seater with a bit of luggage space back there. Any nitpicking worth doing? Well, I suppose you might find the visibility a little bit pinched because the scuttle, the dashboard is so high and it's accentuated because you can actually get the seat nice and low and then there's a strange carryover from the previous Vantage, lovely new interior but the key is still like carrying around a computer mouse in your pocket and as far as I can see, they didn't actually leave anywhere you could plug this in and hide it. Normally, when a car is updated and uprated in the middle of its life, we call it a facelift but this is more like that bit in Captain America where the normal kid gets in the science booth thing and steps out with superpowers because so much is different. It's wider, stiffer, cleverer, much more powerful. There's a sense of a new character as well of a more unapologetic, outrageous Aston Martin just like the good old days.