We climb into the car, slinking down low
onto very firm leather seats. Barritt presses the Aston’s jewel-like key into
the dash and the V12 spins busily before erupting with a purposeful burble. We
move out of the car park and onto a set of Barritt’s favorite test roads.
Passengering
with chief platform engineer Paul Barritt. "there was nothing wrong with
the Rapide. It's one of our best balanced cars"
‘There was nothing wrong with the Rapide,’
says Barritt. ‘It’s one of our best-balanced cars, but we’ve worked hard to
give it more of a Jekyll and Hyde character – the Sport mode is sportier, with
punchier gear shifts when you’re really going for it, while we’ve made Normal
more relaxed and improved the fuel economy by tuning the gear changes on the
six-speed ZF auto.’
‘There
was nothing wrong with the Rapide,’ says Barritt.
Just like the Vanquish, part of the impetus
for the revisions came from pedestrian protection regulations, which Aston has
tackled by adding perforated sides to the under bonnet skin. You see them when
you pop the bonnet; they help it deform more readily and by lowering the V12
90mm. Crucially, dropping the engine has the added benefit of reducing the center
of gravity, improving the Rapide’s handling. But it’s a big job, as Barritt
explains: ‘The effect ripples through the car. There are big changes for the
front of the car, the pipes on the engine have to be looked at, and we’ve
changed all the engine mounts – they’re crucial for the ride quality. They’re
hydraulic and act like dampers for the powertrain – we’re looking to get rid of
the powertrain resonance and get the mass of the powertrain working with the
body. Here’s a good bit down here…’
That
sneaky plastic trim behind the number- plate disguises a new one piece grille
as shown on the final production car
We surge down a steep gradient, which drops
away into a further compression. The Rapide goes light, then compresses in the
dip. ‘There,’ says Barritt, ‘feel that? It really sends the car into heave!’ It
reveals the balance the Rapide chassis strikes: firm and controlled, but still
soaking up the worst punishment these tricky roads can muster. ‘The spring
rates are the same,’ explains Barritt, ‘because the car’s the same weight, but
we have had a look at the Bilstein dampers. There’s also a third mode for the
adaptive suspension a track mode but you’re fine with Normal most of the time.’
Most of the changes will be lost on Joe
Public, but not the extra 60kW. Here, the Rapide S essentially follows the
Vanquish, although Aston has given the bottom end more refinement than its
sportier sibling: there’s variable valve-timing on the inlet and outlet cams, a
revised block and new heads and enlarged throttle bodies. But it doesn’t have
the Vanquish’s flat-valve air boxes, and they’re largely responsible for the
range-topping sports car retaining 11kw of superiority.
I recently complained that the Vanquish
isn’t fast enough, but when you’re in the passenger seat of a Rapide S in
sub-zero temperatures, it still feels like it can fire you down the road at an
indecent rate. But, just like the Vanquish, a Ferrari V12 looms over it: the FF
punches out an additional 75kW.
‘We’ve
worked hard to give the Rapide S more of a Jekyll and Hyde character’
We head back to base where emissions and
calibration engineer Matthew Johnson plugs in his laptop. A vast array of files
pop up, detailing cam angle, lambda sensor and mass airflow information, plus
fuel-pulse width. While most people will dismiss the Rapide S as mild
tinkering, Johnson will tell you he’s been working on it for two and a half
years, endlessly fine-tuning such things as how much fuel is used in the
warm-up process. ‘A naturally aspirated engine is optimized for maximum
efficient breathing and that can have a negative effect on mixture preparation
for cold-start and the warm-up phase,’ he explains. ‘I’ve been looking at cam
timing to realize the best possible emissions.’
In an era when the Germans have given us
big kW gains coupled with tumbling CO2, Johnson admits that the V12 only
betters the old Rapide’s 355g/km by 1-2%, but points to the huge slab of extra
power and that it’s a cleaner engine overall that also complies with strict new
EU6 regulations.
For now, Aston has no stop/start system or
trick eight-speed auto, nor any plans to offer four-wheel drive, as all its rivals
do. But the Rapide remains a compelling proposition, with style, pace and a
dose of practicality. We’ll see how it stacks up against the opposition very
soon.
Marek Reichman
Design is as key to the appeal of an Aston
Martin as noise or performance. But how do you push forward when you’ve spent a
decade carefully nurturing a successful style or, as you might say, reheating
the same old pie?
That balancing act is the job of Aston’s
design director, Marek Reichman, who inherited the trademark DB9-shape Aston
template from his predecessor, Henrik Fisker, when he arrived in 2005. His
early jobs at Gaydon included the DBS, essentially a more muscular DB9, and the
four-door Rapide. But the strikingly different One-77 supercar gave us out
first real hint at where he wanted to take Aston’s design. Now that new design
language has started to filter onto Aston’s other cars, starting with the
latest Vanquish and Vantage Zagato.
Sheffield-born Reichman kicked off his
career with Rover, before moving to BMW, including a spell rebooting Land
Rover’s design in the run-up to the 2003 Range Rover.
