Since last year, Aston Martin has been supplying the Official Safety Car and Official Medical Car for the Formula 1 championship, together with Mercedes-AMG. For this year’s season, the Vantage serves as the Official Safety Car, while the DBX707 is the Official Medical Car with the crucial role of getting to any incident sites around the track as quickly as possible.
While the Official Safety Car is essentially one of a kind, with a lot of equipment specifically installed for its role at each round of the F1 championship, there is the Vantage F1 Edition which is offered for sale to the public. This special model benefits from unique and significant chassis and aerodynamic improvements developed by the engineering team at Aston Martin.
The team also drew on the significant performance enhancements, driven by improved lap time performance to successfully carry out its role on the F1 track, but without compromising its on-road capabilities. Following the success of these enhancements, which were integrated into the production car – ultimately developing the Vantage F1 Edition.
It is the most sporting Vantage in the production range and in essence, a replica of the Vantage Official Safety Car, and the fastest and most focused Vantage. The engineering team targeted intelligent, incremental improvements across multiple areas of the Vantage F1 Edition’s powertrain, chassis and aerodynamics to bring out more character, increase tactility and expand its outright capabilities.
Starting with the 4-litre twin-turbo V8 engine, the power output is raised by 25 ps to a maximum of 535 ps. Peak torque remains unchanged at 685 Nm but that peak is sustained for longer to further increase tractability and in-gear urgency. The Vantage F1 Edition is available only an 8-speed automatic transmission, with an optimised torque cut during upshifts that reduces shift times and increases the feeling of directness and precision.
For the chassis, the team’s focus centered on the suspension and steering, with further detailed underbody modifications to increase front structural stiffness for a further improvement in steering feel and response. Reworked damper internals have increased the dampers’ effective force range. This increase in bandwidth brings a noticeable improvement in vertical body control – both through high-speed compressions and over crests – without any deterioration in low-speed compliance.
To complement changes to the dampers, the chassis also benefits from increased rear spring rate and lateral stiffness to help sharpen turn-in, increase traction (especially over bumps) and ensure the rear-end is tuned to compliment the front-end’s rate of response.
Further improvements to response and to what the driver feels have been made to the steering system, allowing feedback from the road to be transmitted more clearly, which in turn helped build a detailed sense of available grip.
With the chassis hardware optimised, the wheels and tyres have also been specifically chosen, with larger 21-inch wheels as standard for the Vantage F1 Edition. All four wheels use Pirelli tyres developed specifically for the special model, the fronts sized at 255/35ZR21 and the rears at 295/30ZR21.
With faster speeds, the need for better aerodynamic performance is even greater. The specially designed aerokit generates positive front and rear downforce totalling up to 200 kgs. The aerodynamic changes comprise a full-width front splitter, front dive planes, underbody turning vanes, and – most obviously – the new rear wing.
The Vantage F1 Edition – in Coupe and Roadster bodystyles – can be ordered with the Aston Martin Racing Green colour scheme, mimicking the Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team car, as well as the Official Safety Car. But customers can also specify other colours if they wish, along with a wide range of personalisation options within.
In Malaysia, the retail price of an officially imported Vantage F1 Edition is RM978,000 (excluding taxes and duties) and customers are assured of full aftersales support.
