Halcyon Daže

New Vantage Roadster turns the clock back to the good old days

- Story: Ben Miller

RAINWATER (NOT PICTURED) STREAMS serenely across the Vantage’s bonnet, frail rivulets oscillating to the fury of the twin-turbo V8 at work inches beneath the curved sheet metal across which they are moving. Glancing over my shoulder, I am able to tear my eyes from the Roadster’s outrageously muscular rear arches just long enough to admire the majestic wake of spray trailing us like a comet's tail. And then there is the noise: honeyed yet colossal, like tectonic shift through the warmest of effects pedals.

High in the Alps, the sky is an expressionist canvas of bruised blacks, cloud-marbled white, and deepest azure. The gradients are ferocious, obviously, and the puzzles posed by the roads that crisscross these mountains fiendishly three-dimensional. It is also raining. Caution feels appropriate, as does a roof, but we have come too far to worry too much about those.

Snug behind the fiercely raked screen, we are out of reach of the rain, even with the roof down, and together the Aston’s keen front axle, monumental performance, and tidy traction are as unbothered by the weather as the ancient pines that stand sentinel beside the road. Happy days.

And these are happy days indeed for a marque as synonymous with boom and bust as James Bond. With the same laser-guided, big-spending precision with which he has put together the dreamiest Formula 1 team on the grid (now it just needs time and next year's fresh regulations), Lawrence Stroll has gifted Gaydon its best tilt yet at sustained greatness.