Project Petrolhead

“What If” questions often lead to some of the most inventive outcomes. What if we could beam images through the air into people’s homes? What if we could shrink down a computer enough for you to put it in your pocket? What if we tried to put a man on the moon? What if we swap the main actor on our time travel sci-fi show and say that he changes his face when he dies? Then you end up with Doctor Who running for 60-odd years with fifteen different Doctors (Or closer to thirty if you count… you know what, never mind, I could be here all day). My point is, you never know unless you try. So, in the mid-noughties when an engineer at Aston Martin asked, “What if we put our biggest, most powerful engine into our smallest car?” well, you end up with something really special.

In 2008, Aston Martin shipped a bunch of motoring journalists out to Circuit Paul Ricard in France to take a look at a little project they’d been working on. It was called the Vantage RS, and the recipe seemed impossible. They’d started by taking a normal V8 Vantage – not only the best handling sports car in their lineup but one of the best handling cars you could buy – and thrown the front half of it away. In its place was an all-new front subframe, wider track, the beefed-up gearbox from the DBS and the 600 horsepower 6.0 litre V12 from the DBRS9 racing car. Oh My.

With the hearty seal of approval from Britains automotive writers, the Aston lads and lasses set about making the Vantage RS dream a reality. Or at the very least trying to, anyway. As it turns out, there are quite strict regulations determining whether or not a car can be considered “road legal” and the Vantage RS met… almost none of them. The front tyres sat proud of the arches, the chassis couldn’t really handle the ferocious torque and in its fully un-corked specification, the race-spec engine would have single-handedly detonated every member of Greenpeace in a 300-mile radius. Luckily, Aston Martin had an ace up their sleeve. While Volkswagen might have a parts bin of switchgear and piddly diesel engines to swap into every car in their stable, Aston Martin had a veritable fleet of V12 supercars in their back catalogue, perfect for a bit of Supermarket Sweep.

In late 2009, the new Vantage arrived in full road legal trim. Now dubbed “V12 Vantage” for obvious reasons, it featured the slightly de-tuned but altogether more usable 510 horsepower V12, six-speed manual gearbox and standard-fit carbon ceramic brakes from its big brother: the DBS, alongside fit and finish worthy of it’s steep £135,000 price tag – some £50,000 more than the normal V8 Vantage. The price was of very little concern to those driving however, as the V12 Vantage very quickly cemented itself as one of the all-time great drivers’ cars. The combination of tiny footprint, light weight and enormous engine put the Vantage into a class of one, with the likes of Porsche’s GT3 unable to match it for power and Ferrari’s 599 GTB being too unwieldy to keep pace with the Aston on narrow, bumpy British roads. The analogue package of a manual gearbox and large-capacity naturally aspirated engine easily earned the Vantage heaps of critical praise from the world’s motoring press with EVO magazine’s Henry Catchpole espousing “Crowbarring 50 per cent more cylinders into a small car is childishly appealing to any enthusiast, but there was always the danger that Aston’s engineers could have created a caricaturish monster. They haven’t. […] Debonair and unafraid, it feels like a truly British Aston Martin.”

How does one go about making a very special car, even more so? Well, if you’re Aston Martin, you start by working backwards. The V12 Vantage originated from marrying a road car to a racing car, so why not do the same again? In 2015, Aston took the standard V12 Vantage, stripped 100kg from its kerb weight, widened the wheelarches to house wider, stickier tyres, bolted on a carbon-fibre wing and splitter for extra downforce and garnished the dish with the 595 horsepower V12 and paddle-shift gearbox from the contemporary Vanquish to create the Vantage GT12 – a track-bred road-legal racer that broke cover as a competitor at the 2015 Nürburgring 24hr race. Loved by those who saw it (and even more by those who heard it’s dulcet tones) the road version of the GT12 released just a few moths later, going toe-to-toe with the likes of Ferrari’s 458 Speciale, Mercedes’ SLS Black Series and Porsche’s flagship 911 GT3 RS, boasting an engine that the others could only wish for. It might have looked like it was designed by a hyperactive schoolchild, but it certainly had the bite to match the bark.

As the decade drew to a close, Aston Martin prepared to move into their next era. With a new partnership with AMG bringing smaller, turbocharged engines into Aston’s lineup, it seemed the days of the hairy-chested 6.0 litre V12 were over, with the final production version finding a home in the runout AMR version of the four-door Rapide, but it seems Aston’s customers were more hesitant to let it go. In 2020, one of Aston Martin’s best (read: wealthiest) customers approached their bespoke customisation department (that Aston calls “Q Division”, fnar fnar) with an idea. Take the hardcore GT12 and make it a bit more road biased. Remove the silly wing and aerodynamic addenda, swap the paddle-shift gearbox for an old-school manual, and turn the road racer into a continent-crushing GT car in the classic meaning of the term. Aston Martin agreed and set about a limited run of fourteen cars – seven coupes and seven convertible roadsters – dipping into the archives once again for a name. Way back in the ancient history of 1992, Aston Martin bolted two superchargers onto an anaemic V8 and inadvertently built the most powerful road car money could buy. They called this nineties flagship the Vantage V600, and with the new car’s V12 putting out 600 metric horsepower, the name seemed fitting.

Two years ago, I proclaimed that; should I ever win the lottery, I would immediately buy an Aston Martin V12 Vantage. To the shock of absolutely nobody, I still haven’t been presented with a comically oversized cheque, but I do still pine for the tiny Aston with the heart of a supercar. As progress draws us further and further into the future with EVs, ADAS and endless, endless automation and augmentation, I find myself more and more wanting a car that strips all of that away. Just you, an enormous engine, a clutch pedal and a gear wand. The motoring equivalent of listening to music on vinyl. And it never would have come to pass if nobody had ever asked “What If?…”