No more comfort-tourer, the new Vanquish is coming in hot.
British sports car specialists Aston Martin have serious targets for their incoming Vanquish to take on, with comments from brand boss Dr. Andy Palmer suggesting that the comfortable, long-legged tourer will take on a sharper and more focused form when it arrives next year, shortly after the introduction of the smaller Vantage sports car.
In comments made out to Autocar, the good (honorary) doctor made it very clear that with the Vanquish, they’ll be taking a more performance-oriented approach and eschew most of the associations that were levelled at the outgoing car. Dr. Palmer said that the Vanquish has been “developed to compete with the Ferrari 812 Superfast,” distancing itself from more plush and luxurious rivals like the Bentley Continental GT and Mercedes-Benz S-Coupe.
However, the new Vanquish will retain a V12 engine under the bonnet, likely to be a heavily-reworked version of the 5.2-litre unit in the DB11. While it produces 447kW in that application, it’s likely that the engine will be tuned further and maybe even made larger in displacement given that the present Vanquish S produces similar figures, and the new one would have to outdo the DB11 for outright grunt.
Dr. Palmer has described the new Vanquish, recently seen in final-stage testing, as “bloody good,” with the car itself now just waiting for production.
“The majority of product investment for the Vanquish is finished. What’s left is preparation for manufacturing, rather than preparation of the car itself. We are making more prototypes to make sure we’ve got production ready to go.” — Dr. Andy Palmer, CEO, Aston Martin
The Vanquish will be based on the new platform that debuted with the DB11, which will also be employed for the upcoming Vantage, though it’ll ride on bespoke suspension that will allow it to offer greater driver involvement and provide greater confidence to capitalise on its power. The new structure will also go a great way towards ridding Aston Martin of the “perceptions of old technology, old platforms, and survival as an independent manufacturer,” issues that have dogged the British marque for some time.
The Vanquish launch will follow the introduction of the Vantage (expected to arrive before the end of the month), with the big V12 machine pipped to make a debut in the first half of 2018. Following that will be the DBX SUV in 2019, followed by a couple of Lagonda models (a saloon in 2020 and an SUV in 2022) before wrapping up with a mid-engined supercar in 2021. Somewhere in the mix will be the Vanquish and Vantage Volantes (or cabriolets to you and me), which are expected to come into the fray not long after their fixed-roof siblings.
The Vanquish was a highly-celebrated grand-tourer in its time, and so Aston Martin is bidding it farewell with a series of Vanquish S Ultimate cars, which we covered here.
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