Aston Martin executive chairman Lawrence Stroll was in an upbeat mood at the Financial Times Future of the Car summit in London this week, officially announcing the storied British automaker would be launching eight new cars over the next 24 months. The first of these, the replacement for the DB11 sports coupe, will be revealed on May 24. What the new lineup won’t include, however, is the mid-engine Aston Martin Vanquish, a concept of which was shown at the 2019 Geneva Show.
The mid-engine Vanquish was conceived by former Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer to compete with mainstream mid-engine supercars from Ferrari, Lamborghini, and McLaren. Unlike the mind-melting Valkyrie hypercar and the closely related Valhalla—which will share elements of the mid-engine Valkyrie’s carbon fiber structure and will have a 937 horsepower hybrid powertrain based around a mid-mounted flat-plane crank version of the Mercedes-AMG 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8—the Vanquish was intended to be an ongoing production car, not a limited volume model.
The mid-engine Vanquish would therefore have gone head-to-head with Ferrari’s 296GTB, the successor to Lamborghini’s Huracan, and McLaren’s new 750S, both in terms of performance and pricing. The Geneva concept, code-named AM-RB 003, suggested the car would have had a unique bonded aluminum chassis and a hybrid powertrain built around an all-new 3.0-liter twin-turbo V-6 designed in-house at Aston Martin.
Vanquish looked good on paper. But in the aftermath of the disastrous 2018 IPO that left Aston Martin heavily indebted after major stockholders sold a chunk of their shares and its stock price in freefall, much of it was vaporware. The V-6 engine “was just a concept when I arrived,” said former AMG boss Tobias Moers, hired by Stroll as CEO after the syndicate of investors he led snapped up almost 17 percent of the company in early 2020. Bringing it to production would have cost tens of millions of dollars. “If the engine had been ready, then for sure I would have moved on it, but it was not.”
Moers, who left Aston a year ago, dumped the V-6 in favor of the proven and versatile AMG-sourced 4.0-liter V-8, but even packaging that engine in a bespoke new chassis to create a mid-engine Vanquish would have been too costly for a company that had lost the equivalent of $140 million—before tax—in the first three months of 2022.
Stroll says Aston Martin will now focus on the front engine sports cars that are the core of the brand, along with adding variants of the DBX SUV, which he says now has a 25 percent share of the luxury high-performance SUV segment, and sales of which were up 40 percent in the first quarter of this year. The performance and handling of the front engine cars will be dramatically increased: “We’ve created a new sector, something more superior to a GT,” says Stroll – and the human-machine interface (HMI) infotainment of all the new Astons will be vastly improved, both in terms of appearance and functionality.
The Valhalla “will ultimately come in many variants, not just the one we’ve introduced,” says Stroll, and it will form a part of the Aston Martin lineup for several years to come, with a total volume of 999 cars. And Aston will each year build one or two special cars, in strictly limited volumes of 100 to 300 cars each, and each with a very high price tag. Stroll claims Aston had nearly 900 orders, which is three times the planned production, for the $3 million Valkyrie. “That goes to show the future of what you could do with this incredible brand,” he says.
And the Vanquish nameplate? It’s not going away, insist Aston sources. Don’t be surprised if it appears on the biggest, fastest and most powerful of new front engine Astons, the successor to the DBS.
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