2016 Aston Martin DB11 prototype drive

It’s a DB11; the model Aston Martin calls the most important car in its history. Personally, I think that’s over-egging it slightly, but it’s certainly up there with DBs 2, 4, 7 and 9 in its significance for the future health of this often troubled company.

We've now driven the 2016 Aston Martin DB11. Read the review here.

Many exotic car manufacturers have recently embraced the dark side of better than atmospheric induction and added turbochargers to their petrol engine, Porsche and Ferrari among them, but none more successfully than this. For a turbocharged engine, the noise and response of the DB11’s motor is not good, it’s a miracle. Of course, such an engine does not make a fine GT car, but it certainly sets it off on the right foot.

The DB11 is the most powerful model ever to bear the initials and in Aston road car history it’s beaten for output only by the One-77 and its seven-digit list price. Its bonded aluminium structure and aluminium panels share a philosophy with Aston’s old V/H platform strategy but nothing else. The 5.2-litre V12 motor is related in a similar way to the old 6.0-litre V12. Apparently its bore centre spacings are the same, but that’s about it.

True, it diverts its power to the same eight-speed ZF gearbox now used in the Aston Martin Rapide and Aston Martin Vanquish (but never the DB9) mounted between the rear wheels, but from there power distribution and control is managed by a new design of limited slip differential and Aston Martin’s first multi-link rear axle.

As for that engine, it displaces 5204cc and produces 600 proper brake horsepower. It has cylinder deactivation and stop/start functions, but now also two exhaust-driven turbochargers. In its output and specification it is not dissimilar to the 6.0-litre twin turbo W12 newly re-imagined for the Bentley Bentley Bentayga, but in its character it is as different as a sabre and a sledgehammer.

I’ll leave an in-depth critique of the interior to my colleagues when they try a pristine production specification car later in the year and not this hard worked, dog-eared validation prototype wearing the camouflage of its Bridgestone tyre supplier.

I must post a minor hygiene notice here too: I have not driven the DB11 on the road but only on a private, albeit vast, Bridgestone test track. The car was signed off so far as hardware is concerned, but not software and some fettling of the dampers, the torque vectoring system, the algorithms that set the parameters for Sport and Sport Plus mode for both the powertrain and chassis remain to be done. However, I have caned the engine to the limiter in every gear required to reach 160mph, and slid it around until it ran out of opposite lock.

This engine finally demonstrates how to gain more than you lose through the adoption of turbochargers. Had this been achieved by replacing a merely rather endearing normally aspirated engine, that would be impressive enough; that it has done so filling the already mighty shoes of Aston’s still splendid old V12 is nothing short of remarkable.

Indeed in its noise you suspect something blackly magic at work, some artfully crafted sound symposer or, worse, synthetic sound blasted out through the speakers, but the car has none of it. Of course, its exhausts have been tuned as they are on every new car, but the noise it makes is natural.