Cars

Vantage point

Aston Martin Vantage
Aston Martin Vantage Aston Martin Vantage

To mark the 70th anniversary of its illustrious Vantage nameplate, Aston Martin brought under the one roof examples of the key models to have worn the badge over the decades.

More than a third - or 36,000 - of the cars the company has ever built have been Vantage models.

The first time it appeared was in 1950, when it was applied to a high-specification DB2.

In the early years, it almost always indicated a car with an uprated engine. In the DB2's case, that meant larger carburettors and a higher compression ratio - these were simpler times... - to yield 125bhp from its 2.6-litre engine. This was a big leap from the regular DB2's 105bhp.

The DB4 Vantage of 1961 was the first to add visual as well as engineering changes to the standard car.

It was subtle stuff though, with the Vantage gaining the faired-in headlights from the DB4 GT.

Vantage versions of the DB5, DB6 and original DBS followed, and by 1972 a car called simply the Aston Martin Vantage went on sale; perversely, it was actually the least rather than the most powerful car the company sold at the time.

That was all put right in 1977 when the 380bhp V8 Vantage arrived. Touted as Britain's first supercar, its acceleration was angry enough to eat contemporary Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches for breakfast. For good measure it had a top speed of 170mph.

That car was developed throughout its life and provided the platform for the V8 Vantage Zagato of 1986 - a poster of which adorned this writer's wall when he was at primary school...

The 1990s saw a new Vantage, based on that era's Virage model, with suitably brawny power outputs of up to 600bhp and a top speed nudging 200mph.

Next up was the DB7 V12 Vantage of 1999, and it was succeeded in 2005 by the V8 Vantage, its name mirroring its 1970s predecessor.

This was the most popular Vantage model of them all, with 15,458 coupes and 6,231 roadsters leaving the factory.

A V12 Vantage followed - its ballistic 6.0-litre engine almost cartoonishly oversized for a car of its relatively compact size - and it was later joined by an even more outrageous Vantage S model, capable of 205mph and 0-60mph in 3.5 seconds.

Along the way there was another Zagato version, and then today's Vantage model arrived at the end of 2017.

It uses a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 sourced from Mercedes-AMG which produces 503bhp and 505lb.ft to give a top speed of 195mph and a 0-60mph time of 3.5 seconds.

A Vantage AMR model arrived last year, swapping the regular Vantage's automatic gearbox for an idiosyncratic seven-speed manual gearbox, complete with a dog-leg first gear.