HEAD TO HEAD SUPER CABRIOS

Got £200k going spare and fancy yourself a new summer toy? Aston Vantage takes on Ferrari Roma in the battle of the drop-tops

- OLLIE MARRIAGE

The Yorkshire Dales. The sun's out. The roads twist and flow. The Ribblehead viaduct was just back there, now we're getting stone barns and gambolling lambs. Spring is in the air, roofs are down, warm air buffets the cockpits and all seems right with the world. If you were pottering along here in an MX-5 you'd be pretty certain life didn't get much better. And you'd be right. An MX-5 would blend in better, tread more lightly, be more lamb-like than either the Vantage Roadster or Roma Spider. You could save yourself a fortune, and that would be a very Yorkshire thing to do.

They don't really go in for a Prancing Horse up here. Earlier, driving through Hawes, I was feeling a little exposed. Rightly, since the word I caught on the breeze from a pedestrian was 'topspot'. Or something like that. The Aston, subtler in Californian Sage (unless they knew it was called that) was greeted much more warmly. It's clearly a more Yorkshire car.

But these are the cream of the £200k roadster crop. They're more glamorous than a 911 Cabriolet, more honed than a Continental GTC and less tryhard than something mid-engined. The drop-top Vantage is brand new. A follow up to last year's superb coupe, it carries over all the thunderous goodness of that twin turbo V8, trading a little chassis stiffness and hatchback versatility for a soft-top that drops in only 6.8secs.

The Ferrari requires twice as long - 13.5secs - to disassemble itself, but allows that to happen at up to 37, rather than 31mph. The Roma Spider has been around for a few years now, partnering a coupe version that we've previously found a little overcaffeinated. It replaces the folding hard-top Portofino and appears to take a step backwards by using a soft-top.