In this business, Aston Vantage test cars are like London buses: you wait an age for one to turn up, then two appear in quick succession. The first, which you may have read about, was delivered on the strict understanding we were not to test it against anything else. It’s not that they didn’t want their car compared, they said, and that there’d be time enough for that. Which I reckoned might be some months away.
But no: on Monday morning of last week I was told the same Vantage would be available on Thursday which, it’s fair to say, caused a minor panic down Ti way. We wanted, desperately, to compare it to the Porsche 911 Turbo S because that was the obvious comparison, and also the McLaren Artura precisely because it was not. Problem was both Porsche and McLaren were fairly sure they had no cars available at such refreshingly bracing notice.
But what, we suggested, if we didn’t have the cars for a few days as usual, but had them delivered to a specific mountain location early one morning and collected that same afternoon? Which is how we found ourselves on one of our favourite mountain roads watching a truck disgorge both a Porsche and McLaren, the former essentially nicked off another shoot, the latter a Spider because it was all McLaren could lay its hands on in time, which was completely fair enough. We just pretended it was a coupé (which we could because the carbon tub means the dynamic differences between the models are almost non-existent). We had eight hours.
