2025 Aston Martin Vantage First Drive: A Serious Car for Serious Drivers?

Aston Martin hasn’t changed direction as frequently as its Formula 1 cars do during grands prix, but its historical path has followed anything but a straight line. Just the past few years for the 111-year-old British automaker have featured new ownership, a volatile share price, executive upheaval, and until relatively recently, an aging product lineup. And although the latter’s freshening began three and half years ago with the launch of the DBX SUV and has continued in the past 12 months thanks to the introduction of the DB12 coupe/Volante and now the new 2025 Aston Martin Vantage, the overall portfolio has experienced a philosophical about-face.

Just a month ago, Aston switched course again, announcing it will delay introducing the first of four planned all-electric models from 2025 to 2027, with chairman Lawrence Stroll directing his team to go hard on plug-in hybrid technology for its AMG-sourced V-8 and in-house V-12 combustion engines for well into the 2030s. It seems Aston customers have made it known many of them aren’t ready to accept their cars becoming fast-driving vessels of silent lucidity.

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What Is the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage?

Whatever impetus those customers provided Stroll and his executives and engineers in Gaydon to maintain a grip on the marque’s combustion future—and we thank them for that a thousand times—the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage is unlikely to disappoint the most dedicated driving enthusiasts among them.

The two-seat coupe boasts 50:50 front/rear weight distribution and an estimated curb weight of 3,750 pounds (roughly the same as the car it replaces), and it uses an evolution of the company’s bonded extruded aluminum chassis Aston says is about 5 percent stiffer overall. But it’s quick to point out notable localized improvements, such as being twice as stiff as the old Vantage’s chassis at the suspension strut tops at all four corners. The extra rigidity comes in part from a new structural crossmember across the front end, moved further rearward to stiffen the suspension’s A-arm mounting points for improved steering feel. Feel is also made better by a revised, less insulated steering column design. There are new bushings as well as a new cross brace between the front shock towers, too. As for the rear multilink suspension, Aston engineers report the stronger towers yield a 29 percent stiffness increase during cornering.

Director of vehicle performance Simon Newton says the car’s spring rates and anti-roll bars are about 4 percent stiffer, and the hydraulically variable dampers—along with the more rigid platform—are most responsible for differentiating the new Vantage from its predecessor in terms of dynamics. It’s not quite that simple, as we’ll get to, but the new damper rates are more in line with the even sportier setup used in the former Vantage F1 Edition than they are with the standard old car, with a wider range of control via the new Vantage’s various driving modes. In terms of quantifiable numbers, Newton says the result is 12 percent less understeer.

That latter figure is significant and, according to Newton, helps the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage lap Spain’s Circuito Monteblanco—where we’re about to drive it—3.5 seconds quicker than its predecessor. But the performance leap isn’t all courtesy of super-magically improved handling dynamics, as Aston’s latest AMG-based engine package, also found in the DB12 and DBX, takes a big jump of its own.

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Numbers Game

Larger twin turbos, new cam profiles, a compression ratio of 8.6:1 versus 10.5 for the previous Vantage (which allows more air to enter the cylinders when the engine is on boost), and a revised and improved cooling package to cope with it all deliver peaks of 656 horsepower and 590 lb-ft of torque. Compare those figures to the outgoing car’s 503 hp and 505 lb-ft, and you don’t need to be a performance car enthusiast—let alone an engineer—to get the picture.

Aston Martin says the 2025 Vantage accelerates to 60 mph in 3.4 seconds and a yikes-level top speed of 202 mph. Being rear-drive and traction-limited off the starting line, the official 60-mph time is only 0.1 second quicker than before, but the top speed trumps its previous best by a strong 7 mph to gain membership to the 200-mph party. Given the new model’s horsepower and torque advantages, the quarter mile should paint a clearer picture of the performance jump. We didn’t test the previous Vantage coupe but did test a 2021 Vantage Roadster to the tune of an 11.9-second time. Aston hasn’t provided an estimated time for the 2025 edition, so we need to get our hands on it for our official MotorTrend testing regimen before we can provide a definitive answer, but this car should be significantly quicker.

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Ready to Rip

Drive the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage, and a couple of quirks are notable by their absence. Gone are the clunky, separate buttons for PRND dispersed throughout the old version’s cockpit, replaced by a logical, modern gear-selector toggle on the center console for cycling through RND, and a push-button P function directly beside it. (Although if you want to pop the hood, the release lever is still unintuitively found—for left-hand-drive countries—in the wholly obvious location of the passenger footwell.) And if you’re in the mood for music other than a surly exhaust note, you can cycle through songs via a steering-wheel control, whereas before you could merely adjust volume. There’s even, shockingly, a glove compartment. More jarring for anyone at all familiar with recent Aston infotainment systems, an all-new electrical architecture and user interface/experience is legitimately appropriate for today.

These mundane items are standard fare found in countless modern cars of all types, so they’re nothing to write home about—unless you happen to have owned a relatively new car built by Aston Martin. It desperately needed to address such shortcomings, especially at the Vantage’s, ahem, $194,400 starting price. Once you see it did so, you quickly concentrate on what matters most: hustling the car down the road.

A can’t-miss-it, more in-your-face, aggressively bulky yet somehow still svelte exterior redesign cuts an intimidating presence on Spanish roads in the Andalusia region. Most aggressive in terms of body presence is its 3.5 inches of additional width; overall length increases by less than a quarter inch; height and wheelbase are the same as before due to the underlying revised but carryover architecture.

“Hustle” is the proper verb because the earlier Vantage, while being fun to drive hard, leaned more toward the grand touring side of the performance-car Venn diagram. The upgrades made to the 2025 version are intended specifically to push it into “being a super sports car,” as Aston’s director of product and market strategy Alex Long says, “with over 200 mph and 0–60 in 3.4 seconds. But the midrange punch is up there with anything at the price point. And it’s faster in some cases because it’s got so much torque.”

Speaking of Venn diagrams, Aston showed one during its Vantage presentation to media members that illustrated its desire to push itself further up the luxury super sports car chain past things like the standard Porsche 911 Carrera S and certain AMG models, and nearer to marques like Ferrari and McLaren. This is why we recently found even the DB12 Volante rides on a surprisingly aggressive setup versus what we expected—and why the new Vantage eschews its touring-first roots.

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Say Again?

That’s not to say the car’s ride quality is over-the-top stiff or jarring. Even in its hardest setting, you can drive comfortably over many road surfaces without it wearing you out, although the stiff damping can become an annoyance and a distraction on a truly bumpy road, and each of its three suspension modes feels incrementally more focused than the previous version's. But the outcome is like the old Vantage in the sense that each setting has its own discernible but not drastically different character, yet all remain usable while being more focused on dynamics than before. The ride/handling balance is instrumental in the Vantage’s overall personality remake. And, as Long says, so is the torque. And the horsepower. And the braking power. And the sharper front-end bite. 

Driving the car initially on mostly straight streets near Seville, it takes a while for it to all sink in because you’re still inclined to think of the Vantage as a GT, not a pure sports car. When you finally reach miles’ worth of gloriously challenging, snaking, and sweeping country curves, though, everything clicks with the subtlety of being clobbered by a hand-built British mace. Despite its generously increased width and overall mass, the Vantage soon doesn’t feel as large as you might expect, a perception enhanced by its precise but relatively light steering weight. Not a lot of “noise” comes through the wheel into your hands, but it manages to relay surface details if you pay attention to what you feel. Snap the car into a bend, and that sharp front end changes direction yesterday. It’s satisfyingly immediate without ever feeling unstable.

Brake hard into corners and roll into the throttle on exit, and a wave of torque and horsepower shove you out of the exit at a pace that, if you don’t bleed off the pedal, has high potential to unsettle passengers (and you) on public roads. The powerband isn’t only good for megabursts, either. At 45 or even 35 mph in fourth gear, a deep jab of the gas pedal yields acceleration strong enough to get back up to highway speed and nullify any need for a downshift. By the end of the route, Aston’s pre-drive promises of delivering a car “for real drivers” seems to carry weight. It's still not quite a "super sports car" in the way a mid-engine McLaren or Ferrari are, but it's so outright fast and capable that you understand where Aston is trying to go with it all as part of the overall strategy shift.

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Track Time With the Vantage

Taking the show to the Circuito Monteblanco road course obliterates any lingering doubts about the Vantage’s upgraded personality. Aston is so confident in its car’s ability, it lets us loose for three 15-minute sessions with no instructor-driven car to follow, no speed-killing coned-off chicanes installed on the long front straight—a rarity more and more these days when it comes to carmakers’ new-product launches. Consistently reaching about 165 mph followed by braking just past the 200-meter board for a slow 180-degree Turn 1, the optional carbon-ceramic brakes haul everything down easily in time to make the corner. The brake pedal is a thing to relish, as a reworked brake booster contributes to an exceptionally stiff-feeling pedal underfoot that lets you modulate your pressure with a huge amount of fine control.

Trail off that pedal and … crikey rotation! The work done to the chassis and suspension help to pivot the new Vantage on corner entry with repeatable ease, letting you feel like a star and putting the car on the quickest trajectory for a scorched-earth exit thanks to the big-time haymaker thrown by the engine. The acceleration is made that much better by the car’s eight-speed ZF automatic (or paddle-shifted) gearbox that has a shortened final-drive ratio and new shift logic that reduces shift speeds (though it of course doesn't feel as quick as something like Porsche's PDK dual-clutch unit) and changes personalities depending on which of the Vantage’s preset drive modes you select (Wet, Sport, Sport+, or Track).

There’s also an advanced electronics package behind the car’s dynamic rotational behavior. A six-axis sensor array pulls data from the accelerometer, powertrain, brakes, and electronic differential and informs how the stability control reacts in various grip conditions. Info about the chassis’ movement in multiple directions means the stability control system adapts its behavior accordingly and in concert with the differential. The latter can switch from zero to full lockup in 135 milliseconds, Aston says, and, along with the stability control and a feature Aston calls Brake Slip Vectoring, it’s part of what’s behind the easily induced rotation on corner entry. If that’s not enough for you, there’s also on-the-fly, rotary-adjustable eight-stage and fully defeatable traction control, and fully defeatable stability control (welcome to drift city, if that’s your bag).

Our Verdict: 2025 Aston Martin Vantage

The sum of all these improvements is a car you can drive from home to a track day—where it will shine—and back again, without questioning whether it’s compromised a bit too much for either scenario. Finally, the Vantage loses any remaining slivers of not being a serious sports car, stepping into the performance and driving experience realm of upper-range 911s and AMG GTs. We won't know how it truly stacks up against cars like that until we run them head-to-head, but it should be in the game.

In the big picture, the company still has more turns to negotiate as it revamps its cars' personalities and its overall brand image, but as a step down that road, these latest products indicate its aspiration to move into more rarefied air seems to have more likelihood of coming to fruition than at any other time in its modern era. Along with the 2025 Vantage and the new DB12 models, the DBX SUV will be available shortly with its first major refresh, and the long-anticipated, twin-turbo-V-12-powered replacement for the DBS—apparently set to mark the return of the Vanquish name—is inbound, too. In total, Aston will have updated or replaced all its core cars by Q3 of this year, not to mention the forthcoming Valhalla hypercar. How it all shakes out will be determined largely by buyer demand and satisfaction, and with this company it seems you never know how long internal corporate stability will last, but the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage has the goods to contribute strongly to the latest vision.