Vantage RS
Vantage RS
VANTAGE RS
"Earning its stripes"
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2008/04/stories/04/1.html
Alguns excertos:
"The Vantage RS became my favourite Aston Martin when I first heard it fire up and watched it trundle out of the pit garage at Paul Ricard Circuit in the south of France. Well, I suspected that it might be my favourite Aston at that moment - favourite ever, that is,
ever, going as far back as you like, pre-war, post-war, you name it.
Couldn't be a hundred per cent sure, but it didn't seem as if it needed to do much more. The sound of that magnificent 6.0-litre V12 engine barking into life took me most of the way there - the shrill metallic whap is one of the world's great engine notes. And it pops and bangs on the overrun. Ah."
I had to drive the RS at 50-60mph and no faster, for safety reasons. Never has a car felt so constrained during this activity - you could almost sense the Aston wondering what on earth was going on.
Here we are, at Paul Ricard Circuit, which is deserted, it's a clear, warm evening and I'm forced to sit at 50? What are you doing, driver? It just wanted to
go, every fibre of it was willing me to go, to nail the throttle pedal so hard it smashed through the firewall and clattered onto the track. But not yet.
"Once a year, Aston Martin Racing does this for its customer teams, gives them a track to play on for a couple of days. So all of the quickest AM racers were there - factory GT1, GT2 and GT3 Le Mans cars, an amazing AM-powered Lola LMP1 Le Mans prototype lapping 10 seconds quicker than anything else, plus a swathe of Vantage N24 customer cars.
So, we'll be sharing the track with the likes of Heinz-Harald Frentzen, who may become an Aston Martin works driver this year. No road driving yet, because the RS isn't road legal, but that's cool, just let me nail that throttle pedal. "
"I'm in second gear and the rear tyres, 305s, semi-slick, immediately light up, the whole car twisting slightly sideways with the torque effect. And they were pretty warm before I got in the car. Shit. OK, we expected that. Third now. They light up again, instant wheelspin. Shit."
It's difficult to get your head around the straight-line acceleration of this thing beyond 100mph, but maybe this little anecdote will help: I came onto the mile-and-a-bit-long back straight of Ricard and let Frentzen through in
the Gulf-liveried GT1 DBR9, headlights ablaze, on a quick one.
Then I tucked in and stayed with him as he built up speed down that l-o-n-g straight. He's running about the same engine, see, but is also loaded with a shedload more downforce, which equates to more drag.
So I was just as fast, if not faster, in my clean, drag-free, road-going RS. What a moment, on the back straight at Ricard, slipstreaming Frentzen's Le Mans car comfortably in a road car, listening to his shrill V12 exhaust note piercing my windscreen, watching the speedo clock up toward 200mph.
At the end of the straight is a very fast fourth-gear right hander. Frentzen braked about 100m later than me and probably carried 70mph more through there and promptly disappeared. But the RS had had its moment. It had kept up with big brother.
There are still people in this world - some of them slightly unhinged - who like old-fashioned fast cars. Not old-fashioned in a technical sense... the RS is far from that.
Old-fashioned in nature, brutish bruisers, the car equivalent of a right hook to the face. Basic, straightforward, honest, monstrous rear-wheel-drive cars that only barely (
barely) contain the output of their engines... and in doing so become far more appealing than the sum of their parts.
The Vantage RS is just such a car. It has all the nastiness and murderous force of a Dodge Viper, but its chassis and steering handles that force in a far more subtle way - you can properly connect with it, learn its secrets, push it hard.
Cut loose and do something dumb, and it will bite. That punch in the face is never far away. And raw spirit is there in spades, spirit that only a proper well-hung, front-engined, rear-wheel drive supercar can have.
An Aston insider told me that no final decision has been made about what to call the thing. 'Vantage RS' is by no means fixed as its real-world name.
E para acabar em grande nada melhor do que ouvir o cantar do V12 deste Vantage RS:
http://www.astonmartin.com/content/...irect)|utmcmd=(none)&__utmv=-&__utmk=65240494
É só clicar e ouvir ou então guardar no pc e ouvir vezes sem conta!! [br
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