It’s never too early to cash in on Christmas, so last week I was making my
annual crash bash wallop DVD for your yuletide viewing pleasure. Mostly this
has involved filling old cars with petrol and blowing them up and driving
new cars round corners much too quickly, while shouting.
It was enormously good fun hurtling round RAF Benson’s perimeter road on
someone else’s tyres using someone else’s insurance. But it was even more
fun when the filming was over for the day and I was faced with a choice of
what to take home. Let me give you some idea of the scale of the dilemma.
There was a Corvette, which is much, much better than you might think, a BMW
M5, a Golf GTI, a Ferrari 612, a Maserati Quattroporte, a Ferrari F430, a 6
litre Vauxhall Monaro, a Mitsubishi Evo IX, a TVR Sagaris, an Aston Martin
DB9 Volante, a Mitsubishi Evo VIII FQ-400, a Range Rover Sport, a Ferrari
Enzo, a Porsche 911 Turbo and rather hopelessly, at the end of the line, a
Vauxhall Astra.
All of them were full of fuel. All had their keys in the ignition. All were
clean, insured and ready to go. And each night, for a whole week, I just had
to choose.
For a blast round the airfield it’d be the Vauxhall Monaro, no question. That
thing is a big old softy with the heart of an elephant and the rear end from
a small hyperactive dog. But on the road, when you can’t smoke the tyres and
hang the tail out some of the appeal is lost.
It’s the same story with the Corvette. And I’m afraid that after eight hours
of shouting and blowing stuff up I wasn’t really in the mood for a supercar.
That’s why, most of the time, I took the M5. But then, one day, the sun came
out and I caught the DB9 Volante winking at me . . .
Now in hard-top form the DB9 is sublime, an intoxicating and irresistible mix
of style, elegance, power, noise, majesty, tradition, comfort and
practicality. So you’d assume that taking the roof off to create the Volante
would add yet more strings to its already formidable bow.
This is not always the case, of course. A Ferrari, for instance, is pretty
much ruined by the removal of its roof. And so’s a Porsche 911.
That’s because these cars are designed to be the absolute last word in driving
pleasure. If you take away the roof some of the body’s integral strength is
lost and if you replace that strength with underfloor beams and bars you add
weight. So either way the point of the car is completely lost. When I see
someone in a drop-top Ferrari or 911 I always point at them and laugh.
Because going out in a convertible 360 is like going out in a superb pair of
trousers with a wet spot at the front.
The Aston Martin DB9, however, is different because it was not designed to be
the last word in driving pleasure. It was designed to be a comfortable,
elegant and powerful long-distance cruiser, a GT car in the real sense of
the word: a Grand Tourer.
So removing the roof, losing the structural integrity and adding weight is a
small price to pay for all the DB9’s attributes . . . plus an al fresco
helicopter hair-do. It shouldn’t really matter. And yet, I’m very sorry to
report, it does.
First of all, and most seriously, some of the coupé’s looks are lost. It’s
still a pretty car, make no mistake, but it doesn’t have that hand-biting Oh
my God-ness of the coupé.
Without a roof you notice that the A-pillars are rather too vertical, and with
nothing connecting the rear haunches to the windscreen it has the
appearance, if you can imagine such a thing, of a lion that’s had its
backbone amputated. It feels that way, too.
When you drive on a normal village street at normal village speeds you can
actually feel the whole car flexing and the steering wheel shimmying in your
hands. This so-called scuttle shake isn’t as bad as it was in, say, an early Saab
convertible, or the old drop-top Escort XR3i. But it’s nowhere near as good
as modern technology allows.
There’s more, too. Because the Americans will not buy a car of this type
unless it has two back seats — no matter how small and useless they may be,
and in the DB9 they’re very small and very useless indeed — the DB9 does not
have a wind deflector behind your head. So on the motorway life in the cabin
is breezy. At 186mph it would be intolerable.
Strangely, however, the Volante cannot do 186. The hard top can but the
engineers were worried that if someone drove at such speeds with the hood in
place the fabric might be damaged. So the Volante is electronically limited
to 165.
I’m sorry. I thought this was the country that invented penicillin and steam
power and the Spitfire. I thought this was the home of ingenuity and
engineering panache. And yet here is Aston Martin telling us that while the
Germans and Italians can design a hood to withstand speeds in excess of
165mph, we cannot. That’s not good enough, boys; not by a long way.
This is my big issue with the Volante. As you trundle along with the chassis
flexing and too much wind in your hair and an electronically limited top
speed, you can’t help wondering if this car was either rushed into
production or done on the cheap, or both.
Take the buttons on the dash as another example. They’re beautiful, for sure,
and when they’re shaded by a roof they work well. But with the sun glinting
on the satin finish it is impossible to see which one does what. One of the
test drivers must have noticed this when the car was developed. He must have
wondered whether they could be changed. But they weren’t. And this in a car
that costs £112,000, £9,000 more than the coupé.
Of course on smooth roads all is well. You still have the wonderful gearbox, a
stereo that can easily compete with the wind noise and, best of all, the
steering judder that plagued early coupés is now gone. If you’re not that
interested in speed and delicacy and razor-sharp engineering I suppose it’s
still a nice place to be.
But I am, so the Volante is a major disappointment. And interestingly my
co-hosts on Top Gear arrived at exactly the same conclusion after testing
the car elsewhere. It’s rare that we agree on . . . well anything, really,
but we all came back from a drive in the drop-head DB and said the same
thing. It’s a great car, spoilt.
The thing is, though, we also agreed that we wouldn’t laugh at anyone who
bought one. Chiefly because, despite the flaws, this is still so cool that
if you stuck a thermometer up its jacksie, the reading would be –274C. One
below absolute zero.
It has the same appeal as a classic car. By today’s standards a Ferrari
Daytona is not fast, not comfortable and has the handling zest of a JCB. In
every measurable way, a modern Vauxhall Astra is better. But which would you
have? And that’s the thing with the Volante. It’s not the best car in the
world, not by a long way, but it is an Aston Martin convertible and that
sort of makes it good enough.
That said, when the DVD shoot finished and I was faced with the choice of what
car to take home for the whole weekend, I still went for the amazing M5.
Unfortunately, as I was leaving the airfield its transmission exploded, the
rear wheels jammed and the on-board computer shut down the V10 in a big
hurry. It ended up going back to its maker on a tow truck. I ended up going
home in a rented Mondeo diesel.
It was better than the Aston and yet, of course, it just wasn’t.
Vital statistics
Model Aston Martin DB9 Volante
Engine 5935cc V12
Power 450bhp @ 6000rpm
Torque 420lb ft @ 5000rpm
Transmission Six-speed auto
Fuel 17.1mpg (combined cycle)
CO2 394g/km
Acceleration 0-60mph: 4.9sec
Top speed 165mph
Price £112,000
Verdict Flawed but still fabulous
Rating 3/5
