One of the owners at my work is a long standing and VERY good customer of Aston Martin. He asked if they were able to come up and Edinburgh brought up 4 cars. Three of the cars were meant to be available to be taken out to drive – a Vantage, a DB11 and a Vanquish – but seems like they got cold feet after arriving with the weather and track conditions so sadly that never happened. However the 4th car was a Vantage V12S with the PowerKit fitted and they flew up Simon Mason (any of our SE track competitors know him?) an AM demo/racing driver from Manchester to take people around on demo laps. The car was a real wolf in sheep’s clothing. In dark green it looked very much standard until it started up and that 6L and nearly 600bhp engine roared into life. Not the fastest of pax laps due to the weather, but the wheels virtually never stopped spinning the whole lap and he never stopped correcting the steering wheel input. Approaching a corner it was squirming under braking, sideways around the corner, squirming again under the brutal acceleration to next corner, squirming under braking, sideways around next corner (and repeat again and again). My views of Aston Martin’s have somewhat changed after Monday.
On the morning of the trackday, AM got in touch to say Shmee, the youtube car reviewer/vlogger was up and asked if he could he come along too in his Vantage GT8. He has posted a vlog of the night, albeit I wouldn’t say it is very exciting! I have usually found him just about bearable to watch, however it was interesting to see him switch from a normal, decent bloke called Tim to the cheesy Shmee presenter we see on Youtube, when he started his filming.
Watching the clip, there are a couple of points that made me smile:
- At the start, around the 10 second mark, when he is doing his intro, my colleague Pete fires up his old 911 and basically drowns him out.
![Laughing so hard!! :damnfunny](./images/smilies/icon_rofl.gif)
- Also at the start, circa 35 secs and 50 secs, talking about fitting the carbon front splitter to go on track and benefit of his £10k carbon rear wing. I must have passed him half a dozen times!
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
- Circa 1:08 min when he says “lots of interesting cars here…GT4….Vanquish……”<then pans round to a colleagues 3 series estate>….”and eh, all sorts of different things” <then pans away quickly>
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
- My Evora and yours truly making an appearance in the pits at the end, circa 14 mins mark.
![Wink :wink:](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
Never intended to track the Evora and it was several secs a lap slower than my old Exige S, although a lot of that would be due to the weather. How wet the track was doesn't come across in the clip and I will agree with him that Macintyres had very little grip. However had so much fun at the hairpin in the wet. The Evora is such an easy car to balance and to break traction when you want it to.