[Auto/Moto] The 2025 Aston Martin Vantage Will Make You Reconsider That Porsche

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For about as long as the Porsche 911 has been water-cooled, it’s been the benchmark for premium, high-performance sports cars. But the tire-smoking, 656-horsepower brute that is the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage is proof that we, collectively, have been stupid. Firstly, they fixed it. Almost every gripe was addressed, massaged, or outright improved with new parts. Then Aston Martin went to town adding more, deliberately moving the Vantage upmarket and above the cloudy haze surrounding the mid-$150,000 sports car segment. It now costs a boastful $191,000, which means it’s in a different market segment than the Vantages that came before. Not only has the wick been turned up significantly from a performance perspective, but the Vantage formula has simply been solved. Secondly, it still does things that a 911 can’t do. More critically, it now does those things without the asterisk of previous Vantages. "Well," you might have said previously, "the Vantage is more emotional and unique than buying another GT Silver Carrera GTS.” Your monologue continues. "Yeah, the interior is worse, and it doesn’t drive as good. But it’s cooler!" Throw all of that out of the window.The new Vantage isn’t just an extra 153 horsepower and a new interior—it has been quite thoroughly redone. After a brief video wherein a subtly hostaged Fernando Alonso was almost certainly being told to say nice things by an off-camera Lawrence Stroll, Aston’s new Director of Vehicle Performance, Simon Newton (formerly of a small company called Lotus), outlined a significant number of changes. The Vantage concept was rebuilt around its bonded aluminum chassis. While overall torsional rigidity increased, total rigidity wasn’t the sole development focus. Rather, Newton’s team focused on increasing the local rigidity in suspension-critical areas: A new firewall, complimented by front suspension tower reinforcements, increases the front local rigidity by 100 percent. Rear rigidity increased by 29 percent with the addition of a strut brace. A retuned electronic power steering system takes advantage of the changes. Leveraging gains from that more-rigid structure, the team retuned every facet of the suspension. New kinematics (essentially, the suspension’s geometric behavior under load), new Bilstein DTX adaptive dampers with a 500 percent wider range of stiffness, and retuned springs and sway bars work to improve performance over the previous Vantage. Everything works through a set of Vantage-specific Michelin Pilot Sport S 5 tires in the same sizing as the larger DB12.Then there’s the Aston’s nuclear-bomb engine. The 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8 from Mercedes-AMG is not simply a re-tuned, off-the-shelf unit. Not only are the turbochargers larger here, but more-aggressive cams are fitted, the engine’s combustion chambers are CNC ported, and there’s a significantly lowered compression ratio. Each improvement tells the story of a more-heavily boosted engine. Where the previous Vantage used a 10.5:1 compression ratio, the 2025 model uses an 8.6:1 ratio; identical to the 605-horsepower variant AMG installed in the E63 and S63. Yet the Aston nets a colossal 656 horsepower, one of the most powerful variants of the AMG 4.0-liter V-8 ever created. But wait, there’s more. A new nine-stage traction control system allows drivers to precisely control the percentage of wheel slip relative to road speed. While the latest Bosch integrated vehicle controller uses brake vectoring, the electronically controlled limited-slip differential and the Vantage’s adaptive dampers to run the show. The hardware is good, with the E-diff capable of going from fully open to 100 percent locked in 135 milliseconds. But the software is where the real party (at least, engineering-wise) starts. A dizzying array of acronyms dominate the Vantage experience. The 6D-IMU inertial measurement unit tracks the Vantage’s movements in six axes, while the Integrated Brake Slip Control (IBC) program actively manages per-wheel brake force to provide optimal yaw and attitude on corner entry, which is called Brake Slip Vectoring (BSV). The Integrated Traction Control (ITC) combines the brakes, engine output, and E-diff to control wheelslip, while Traction Slip Vectoring (TSV) optimizes wheel slip to achieve the desired yaw angle. Basically, there’s a shitload of vectoring happening to make the Vantage dance.

https://www.motor1.com/reviews/719133/2025-aston-martin-vantage-first-drive-review/