14-05-2025
I drove Aston Martin Vantage Roadster – it's car which cries out to be driven hard & will get you a nod of appreciation
I HAD two choices.
Test an open-top Vantage dodging potholes in 20mph Great Britain.
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Test an open-top Vantage dodging potholes at 20mph in the UK... or head to the Alps where roads are smooth, empty, and you can do much more than 20mph?
Credit: Aston Martin
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This roadster is basically the mega Vantage coupe but with headroom of about 20,000 miles
Credit: Aston Martin
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It's a car which cries out to be driven — and driven hard
Credit: Aston Martin
Or head to the Austrian Alps where the roads are smooth and empty and you can do a lot more than 20mph.
I went for option B.
The hills are alive with the sound of . . . a glorious V8.
A masterpiece of engineering in one of nature's great masterpieces.
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Not Coventry ring road.
Same 4-litre twin-turbo V8 sending 665 horses to the rear. And your ears.
Same suspension set-up.
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Same 202mph top speed.
Just a tenth slower off the line. Because it's 60kg heavier.
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You won't be surprised to learn that driving it roof-down, on twisty mountain roads, turns everything up to 11.
The
power
. The torque. The noise. The razor-sharp steering. The handling. The way it makes you feel.
It's a car which cries out to be driven — and driven hard.
Yet equally, it's a car that's just as pleasing parked up outside a cafe.
Vantage Roadster or Porsche 911 Cabriolet?
You can make strong arguments for bothx of them.
Nod of appreciation
Let's just say many other sports cars/supercars are often greeted with the old Nescafe wave from other road users.
This car gets a nod of appreciation wherever it goes.
Because it's cool and sophisticated. And so very British.
As one might expect, the cabin fits like a tailored suit.
Copy-and-paste the regular Vantage. Except here the numbers in the driver's display are bigger and easier to read and there's an extra button on the flight deck of controls. For the roof. Duh.
By the way, the roof is eight layers thick, the motor is whisper-quiet, and it does the up/down sequence in just 6.8 seconds. It's an Aston Martin, darling. What do you expect?
Ignore the £175k price tag. By the time you've spent two days on the configurator it's going to be way more than that.
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It's cool, classy, sophisticated - and so very British
Credit: Aston Martin
Now I should perhaps explain why I'm really in the Alps. James Bond author Ian Fleming went to school in Kitzbuhel.
Timothy Dalton's Bond drove a winterised Aston Martin on the southern Austrian border for The Living Daylights.
Now I should perhaps explain why I'm really tooling about in the Alps.
Any excuse, really.
Q&A: ASTON MARTIN CEO ADRIAN HALLMARK
FAST-forward to 2028 and Aston Martin will be killing it – as a car company, as a Formula 1 team, as a brand. I'm 100-per-cent certain.
Billionaire owner Lawrence Stroll doesn't do anything by half and he's recruited the biggest brains to make Aston world-beaters on and off the track.
Here's ten minutes inside the mind of Aston Martin CEO Adrian Hallmark, headhunted from Bentley last year to reinvent the car side of the business.
Who phoned who?
A mutual contact asked if I'd be interested in a conversation, which I agreed to because I was interested in the story.
So I had the conversation, understood the story, could see the credibility of what they'd done and what they were doing, and thought about it.
It wasn't a quick thing. It was a conversation over many, many months.
What was the deciding factor?
To prove if I could do it again. When I arrived at Bentley I was almost angry with the condition the company had got itself into having worked there before. I knew what it could be and had seen how Ferrari and others had developed.
Aston is another brand that has never realised its true potential. It was never really sustainably profitable. It was very niche. So the chance to do it one more time, as long as I'm feeling happy, healthy, fit and fully energised, what an opportunity.
Have you ever owned an Aston Martin?
Never. In fact, when I drove the Vantage, I almost felt a twinge of guilt. The performance and the quality and the feel of the Vantage is phenomenal. I'd never tried it because I always underestimated what it would be.
The whole philosophy at Bentley is super-fast but relaxed. In an Aston Martin, you feel energised. Every single one. The DB12 looks like an intercontinental cruiser. When you drive it, it's rampant, and feels really energetic and alive.
The Vantage is a step even further and Vanquish is another level. All very different characters, but they've all got this vitality in the way they feel and drive.
And they look the nuts . . . Honestly, you can't drive anywhere without being photographed. Everybody wants to talk to you about them and that's not just in the UK, that's when I'm in France or in Switzerland or travelling.
So what needs fixing?
To be really punchy about it, we were either unimaginative or self-limiting in assuming that we could launch a car for five years and take the top off it as the only action to keep the car relevant to customers.
If I buy a Vantage in 2023, I probably want to change it by 2025-2026.
So what's changed that allows me to come back and feel I'm buying a different and more attractive car than the one I'm already selling?
That's our duty and we've not planned enough of that. We're gonna do the exciting stuff as well. But the real key to building a sustainable profitable business is having this bedrock of products that work through this five, six-year life cycle where there's lots of innovation.
The luxury market has expanded exponentially over the past 20 years and we need to go and get our share.
We're covering a price range from £150,000 to £1million for the base cars. With the plans we've got to take each nameplate and express its full potential, do more specials but at the right cadence, I can see a clear pathway to making the brand sustainably profitable.
Talk to me about electrification . . . Step one is hybridisation. Beyond Valhalla, you'll start to see a complete hybridisation offer in parallel to some of the combustion offers that we have.
We will focus our hybrid approach on performance first and the emissions benefits will be the given.
We are still committed to full electric in the future. But we won't rush to change every model to electric one year after the next. We will launch something in this decade – but we won't have an offer in every body style by the end of this decade.
Will the first EV have four doors and a high hip-point?
More than likely.
An all-new model? Or will you use an existing name?
We've not made those decisions yet.
It's like babies, isn't it?
You have ideas before they are born but always do it after they are born.
Aston has always had James Bond. Now it has F1 too . . . I was jealous to death of James Bond, F1 and the specials business of Aston Martin when I was at Bentley.
Any one thing on its own is interesting. But if you look at the credibility and the integrity of what Lawrence is pulling together, I mean to get Adrian Newey, Enrico Cardile and Andy Cowell into the F1 team, this is not a vanity project. This is freaking serious. All-in.
For now, we've got to get through this season and it's all about 2026, 2027, 2028. That three-year window is what Lawrence and the whole team are absolutely obsessively focused on.
It coincides with where we should be as well. In the next few years we will have refreshed everything. Replaced everything. Not just the derivatives. Every car will be redone. You'll start to see a complete reset of the company both on track and off.
We've got the resources and the talent. Everything we need to get it done.
Last question – what's in your garage at home?
I don't collect cars. I'm a profligate consumer. I would never buy something just to own it. I buy it for the fun of the driving. I've got two G-Wagons, a 1991 Swiss Army eight-seater, and a G63. We've also got a Fiat 500 Electric for the city. It's beautiful. Satin grey, OZ Racing wheels.
