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Bits of tank tape dangle off it where engineers have fashioned crude concealments of its final appearance. Compared to normal press cars, which have been prepped, polished and preened to within an inch of their lives, it’s a mess.
Not that I or its driver, Aston Martin chief engineer Matt Becker, could care less. One minute ago that ‘Aston Martin’ read ‘Lotus’ because that’s what my fingers type automatically whenever Becker is about. We first met when he took me for another passenger ride, that time in an original Elise 23 years ago. And whatever the travails faced by Lotus since them, praise for the ride and handling of its cars has continued unstinted and for that we largely have Becker to thank.
It is well known that the DBS is the replacement for the Vanquish, but that doesn’t mean Becker is just adopting a ‘same but more so’ approach to the car: “The positioning of the DBS is more sporting and extreme than was the Vanquish and I don’t just mean the performance, although that is in a completely different league. Even the Vanquish S, which was a far better car than the Vanquish, was much closer to the DB9 than the DBS is to the DB11. This car has to perform as a supercar GT, so it needs to sit between a pure GT like the DB11 and an out-and-out sports car like the Vantage.”
Becker then starts talking ride frequencies in a language that might as well be Esperanto before putting it terms we can all understand: “During cornering, the DB11 has 3 degrees of roll per ‘g’, the DBS 2.6 degrees and the Vantage 2.1 degrees.”
That is as good a statistical example of where the car has been pitched as any you’ll find.
However, there is nothing in the middle about the powertrain. The truth is that the 5.2-litre V12 motor’s 715bhp is achieved with no hardware modification at all. It was always able to produce than much, but simply held back to 600bhp for the DB11 by software. “But it’s not really about the power,” says Becker, “when you drive it, it’s all about the torque.”
Indeed, for while the power has been raised by 115bhp over the DB11, there’s almost 150lb ft of additional torque, a total of 663lb ft at just 1800rpm. “We needed an all-new gearbox to handle that,” says Becker and the car duly got one, an eight- speed ZF 96HP unit. But even that is at its torque handling limit in the DBS, so much so that torque has to held back to DB11 values in first and second gears.
