Driver's Seat: Meet The Man Making Aston Martins Handle - The Big Picture
Talking With Matt Becker About Aston and the DB11
Until December 2014, Matt Becker had worked, man and boy, at the tiny British sports car maker Lotus. He started as an apprentice at just 16 and made his way through various departments at the company, including a three-year stint in the dyno room, before becoming a junior engineer on the Elise Series 1 in 1995, and then from 2000 heading all Lotus chassis development.
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It was a family thing. Matt's father, Roger, retired as Lotus' director of vehicle engineering in 2010 after a 43-year career. "I basically grew up around cars," Becker says, "and I ended up doing the job my father retired from."
Becker joined Aston Martin on January 5, 2015. And, yes, after all those years at Lotus, there was some culture shock to deal with. "The biggest was the number of acronyms," he laughs, "because there's a lot of Ford-speak in the company from when Aston Martin was part of the Premier Automotive Group." The newbies' manual at Aston's headquarters apparently includes seven pages of acronyms commonly used in the company. "I still don't understand half of them," Becker confesses.
It's been decades since Lotus built a front-engine car, and Aston doesn't currently have a mid-engine car in its lineup, but there were other revelations for Becker, too. "At Lotus the maximum speed for most of our cars was 170, 175 mph," he says, "while Aston has cars that do 200 mph. That's a huge difference." And the new DB11's advanced electronic architecture, sourced from Daimler, offered new ways to tune the chassis. "Having the ability to adjust the steering feel and the damping within the car at all these different speed ranges is a tool that broadens its dynamic capability enormously."
Like many contemporary performance cars, the DB11 allows the driver to switch between damper and powertrain modes, and Becker reveals a dirty little secret about how automakers often use the feature. "What happens in many other companies is when drivers press the button [to change from Comfort to Sport, for example, and vice versa], the computer overshoots the ideal setting and then declines it back to where the engineers want it to be," he says. "But the customer gets the 'experience' of the change; they press the button and feel 'I've made the change.' "
"We're not using that strategy yet," he says as we ride together in the DB11 prototype in Italy. "Will we? I don't know. What I don't want to do is to have a really nice ride and then make it less and less comfortable."
