Aston Martin has never let an outsider drive one of its prototypes at such an early stage, and I can see why: it’s not pretty.
The DB11 before me – arguably the most important car in Aston’s history – is wrapped in Jackson-Pollock-knockoff camouflage splattered with bugs and road dirt. There’s a big red button on the dashboard that’s wired to an on-board fire extinguisher. Under the armrest is an important-looking box with fuses and a mess of wires feeding into it. Velcro strips on the dashboard keep measuring instruments secure. It all looks homemade. Customers paying $245,000 for a deluxe sports car would not put up with this shoddiness, and they won’t have to; the rough edges will be gone or hidden under leather by the time they get their DB11s. There will be no trace of how this fancy sausage was made, and that’s a shame, because it’s cool.
This particular car, VP50, a Verification Prototype, has had a rough life. It recently did hard miles at the Nurburgring in Germany, high-speed testing at Idiada in Spain, and now it’s here at Bridgestone’s European Proving Ground near Rome.
“This is the only one of these we’ve got,” Matt Becker reminds me before we lap the handling track. How much is VP50 worth? Hard to say, but around half a million British pounds, he estimates.
Think of Becker as the Professor Dumbledore of vehicle dynamics, except he’s bald and wears sporty sunglasses. What Becker does is essentially magic. His job is to “fiddle,” as he calls it, tuning the thousands of things that make the difference between a fast, fun, agile car and an absolute dog: spring rates, damping, torque vectoring, vibration, noise, tire sidewall stiffness. The list goes on, and nearly every parameter affects the others. It’s a nightmare.
We’d been warned several times the new twin-turbo V-12 engine makes 516 lb-ft of torque at 1,500 rpm. That’s like a film that begins with the climax. On the wet-handling track, if you so much as sneeze on the throttle with all safety systems off, the DB11 will pirouette into a bush.
As we enter the flooded circuit, Becker switches the traction control into track mode. This seems like a bad idea.
Becker then begins drifting his one-of-one prototype around the track, swinging it from one corner to another, water spraying only on the side windows.
“You can feel there that the stability control cuts torque aggressively,” he says, as the car jerks back into line. “We’re working on fixing that.”
Becker later says that he did a stint as what Hollywood calls a precision driver, drifting the Lotus Exige in the movie Red 2. Bruce Willis hardly did any of his own stunts, I hear.
Becker’s magic was learned not at Hogwarts, but at Lotus, the small British sports car company, where he worked for 26 year, starting when he was only 16. Lotus is universally accepted as the benchmark for ride and handling. But translating the impeccable road manners of a little Lotus to a large Aston Martin will be a massive challenge, if not impossible.
“It’s about 85 per cent complete,” Becker says of the VP50 prototype. In the few months before the DB11 enters production, it’s his job as the vehicle attribute chief engineer to perfect the driving experience.
“For the DB11, I want it to be a comfortable car, vertically compliant – it’s a Grand Tourer – but I still want it to feel connected and engaging.”
If he can pull this off, it would be quite a coup. He’s describing a car that’s as comfortable as a Bentley Continental and as fun to drive as a Ferrari. Nothing like that exists in the automotive world, at least not yet.
Sliding low into the DB11, the seats with their leather broguing, feel as comfortable as an Eames chair.
First impressions of Becker’s work? He makes drifting look easy. Handling the atomic torque bomb this engine drops right from the get-go takes practice, even with limited electronic assistance. It requires quick hands to catch a slide, and doesn’t give much warning before it lets go at low speed. But in practice on the road, you’ll leave all the electronics on, and the additional low- and mid-range torque will make the new engine feel meatier than the old V-12, if sadly not as manic-sounding.
The steering offers fine, grainy feedback about the road surface. At speed, the car’s responses become beautifully linear, making it easy to drive. In GT mode, the body dives and rolls under braking and cornering, letting you feel the speed and forces more naturally.
“The paddle shifters have too much travel right now, 8.5 degrees,” says Becker. He’s working on fixing that, too.
Aston Martin began work on the 5.2-litre twin-turbo V-12 about five years ago. Bridgestone has been working on the DB11’s custom tires – code-named S007, which the company swears is a coincidence – for the past two years.
To get the DB11 to this point, has so far taken the work of about 600 people at Aston Martin, including Becker.
When their work is finally finished later this summer, the DB11 should be a tasty sausage.
The writer was a guest of the auto maker. Content was not subject to approval.
