Divide And Conquer

Aston Martin has sought to put some fresh air dynamically between the new Vantage and its DB11 grand tourer. We head to the roads of northern Finland to get an early taste of the result.

- David Vivian

IVALO AIRPORT IS GREAT. TINY, A PURVEYOR of two sizes of huggable toy husky, and rocking a Christmas Eve aesthetic all year round, Finland’s northernmost landing strip has something almost no other airport has: charm. Make that two things: charm, and a winter-weather proving ground literally a snowball’s throw away. Called Test World, it was snapped up by the Millbrook Group in 2015 to be an almost permanently snowy adjunct to its Bedfordshire-based facility, mainly specialising in tyre testing where grip is lower than Ant Man’s instep at this crunchy, deeply sub-zero time of year.

After an evening of beer and bear burgers at a reluctantly post- Christmas, yet defiantly twinkly Saariselkä – the region’s winter sports resort – I seem to have time-lapsed back to the softly lit airport and Millbrook’s adjacent outpost to see the dawnbreak and suck in a few litres of lung-shock to disperse the fug. Delivering a comparable system jolt is the acid yellow and black disruptor camouflage clinging to (and successfully disrupting) the sharky shape of this year’s Aston Martin Vantage. It’s being prepped for the morning’s slither ‘n’ roll around Test World’s solid-white handling circuit on bespoke cold-weather Pirelli Sottozeros, and as it’s still in the large, echoey on-site garage facility, its Mercedes- AMG-sourced twin-turbo 4-litre V8 is burbling a deeply guttural and reverberant, but assiduously Aston-adjusted, burble.