Vantage AMR

[Imtiazsyed69]

AdamV8V said:

Hi Imtiaz - can I assume the flash was on for this photo?!

I have the same interior colour scheme and in the pics I was sent the blue is somewhat less 'electric'!

Your spot on Adam - your pics reflect the real colour

I’ll take some more pics on Saturday

The back of the seats are orange which looks amazing from the back

Plus it’s axtually a metallic white again my pics are quite bad

[magarnett]

If anyone interested i now have the following V12 Vantage standard spares:-

Front carbon splitter
Rear diffuser
Side sills in Green
Standard V12 exhaust

pm me if interested otherwise they will be going on the wall in the garage as artwork !!!

Cheers

Mark

[jonby]

AdamV8V said:

Imtiazsyed69 said:

Hi Imtiaz - can I assume the flash was on for this photo?!

I have the same interior colour scheme and in the pics I was sent the blue is somewhat less 'electric'!

as you demonstrate and as with the exterior colour of Halo, so difficult to convey accurately in photos

In the second photo, the difference between obsidian black on the steering wheel and pure black in the rest of the car looks more pronounced - I assume it's much less so in real life ?

I have a pure black armrest pad now for the high centre console and looking at it side by side with an obsidian one, it was the grain more than the colour that looked different. But as with the upholstery in your photo, my pure black luggage looks much 'sharper/blacker' than obsidian luggage

It seems to depend partly on what is being covered plus, as black isn't really a shade in the conventional sense, different blacks tend not to clash in the same way that different shades of other colours might. We ended up deciding that as they don't touch and the textures are different, the steering wheel in obsidian was not a problem in a mainly pure black interior

Edited by jonby on Thursday 21st December 14:33

[jonby]

Slowly coming together

Wilmslow received my CF rear blade with custom graphics by Q this morning, so between my home & Wilmslow, we now have the AMR wheels, complete AMR Ti exhaust with the afore mentioned blade, 5 pieces of Q luggage and an arm rest pad

It feels like building a kit car !

It also looks like the final piece of the jigsaw, my order for custom fobs, might actually be resolved, so it's just about waiting now - good things come to those who wait............

[Jon39]

jonby said:

... It also looks like the final piece of the jigsaw, my order for custom fobs, might actually be resolved, so it's just about waiting now - good things come to those who wait............

Exciting times Jonby.

A lot of preparatory homework must be involved, deciding on specifications. There seems to be an almost infinite choice with Q.

On the earlier list, it showed about 8 Roadsters.
Do you know if any of those owners want to have a rear wing fitted, or is that something only suitable for the Coupes?

[RobDown]

My understanding (albeit I didn't push on this as I didnt think it would look right) was that you couldn't fit the wing to the roadster

Indeed even the GT12 Roadster (1 of 1) doesn't have a wing

Not sure why that is, health & safety of the way the roof stows. Or both

[silverspeed]

RobDown said:

My understanding (albeit I didn't push on this as I didnt think it would look right) was that you couldn't fit the wing to the roadster

Indeed even the GT12 Roadster (1 of 1) doesn't have a wing

Not sure why that is, health & safety of the way the roof stows. Or both

As I thought the rear wing looked wrong I asked about the fitting just the extended front splitter on my Roadster but was told not without the rear wing . I took the response that they would fit the pack if I wanted it as a whole .

[silverspeed]

Imtiazsyed69 said:

AdamV8V said:

Hi Imtiaz - can I assume the flash was on for this photo?!

I have the same interior colour scheme and in the pics I was sent the blue is somewhat less 'electric'!

Your spot on Adam - your pics reflect the real colour

I’ll take some more pics on Saturday

The back of the seats are orange which looks amazing from the back

Plus it’s axtually a metallic white again my pics are quite bad

Another interior scheme that I thought wouldn’t work well and in a physical car looks good .
Would love to see how close in colour the body stripe Orange is to the California Poppy Leather where they are close to rear of seat .

[jonby]

RobDown said:

My understanding (albeit I didn't push on this as I didnt think it would look right) was that you couldn't fit the wing to the roadster

Indeed even the GT12 Roadster (1 of 1) doesn't have a wing

Not sure why that is, health & safety of the way the roof stows. Or both

They will argue that the rear wing was developed as part of an overall aero pack that in turn, was developed for the coupe and therefore, creates balance issues for the roadster

Personally, I'm a touch sceptical how much dynamic benefits any of that aero brings to a car with normal ride height, but I just think the spoiler would look plain wrong on the roadster

[jonby]

Jon39 said:

jonby said:

... It also looks like the final piece of the jigsaw, my order for custom fobs, might actually be resolved, so it's just about waiting now - good things come to those who wait............

Exciting times Jonby.

A lot of preparatory homework must be involved, deciding on specifications. There seems to be an almost infinite choice with Q.

On the earlier list, it showed about 8 Roadsters.
Do you know if any of those owners want to have a rear wing fitted, or is that something only suitable for the Coupes?

A lot ? Far more than a lot !!! :-)

I'm not aware of any roadster owners going for more than the side sills out of the aero pack.

Going back to Q, it's to an extent, as complicated as you want to make it

The basic premise is that if you want a list of options, choose from the regular (non Q) options. With Q, you tell them what you are looking for and they come up with solutions

So you get out of the process as much as you put in

I put in a lot. An awful lot. A handful of visits to Gaydon, a good number of phone calls, many 100s of emails, quite a few samples and then they get to a multi page PDF detailing everything, which by V2 or V3 included pricing. In the end we finalised on V5. Some time was saved overall because of the commonality between my car, Ian's & Grahams but then it was added to with the thousands of private emails between the three of us ! Plus there were areas we all had to agree on. Although I don't recall actually disagreeing on anything and we have all added t the process creatively, so none of our cars would have been what they are without all three of us being involved

One area that's really difficult to get your head around is that you seldom get even a rough estimate of price til you formalise the request (which you can then reject). So you spend time, including their time, detailing ideas which if you knew from the start cost £x, you wouldn't spend further time on. That certainly adds to the timeline a lot. Especially as many things can't be quoted in isolation - the cost of my contrast lined glovebox for instance might be different to someone else having the same item, as depending what else we are each having done, that could make our item cheaper or more expensive through economies of scale etc

It certainly all seems worthwhile now that we are receiving photos of some of the Q work in progress, either just to keep us updated or for final approval - some of the graphics for instance are applied using masking tape by hand, where I get to see what they have done in a photo with the masking, say yay or nay, then they paint

And yes, very much exciting times

[silverspeed]

jonby said:

Jon39 said:

jonby said:

... It also looks like the final piece of the jigsaw, my order for custom fobs, might actually be resolved, so it's just about waiting now - good things come to those who wait............

Exciting times Jonby.

A lot of preparatory homework must be involved, deciding on specifications. There seems to be an almost infinite choice with Q.

On the earlier list, it showed about 8 Roadsters.
Do you know if any of those owners want to have a rear wing fitted, or is that something only suitable for the Coupes?

A lot ? Far more than a lot !!! :-)

I'm not aware of any roadster owners going for more than the side sills out of the aero pack.

Going back to Q, it's to an extent, as complicated as you want to make it

The basic premise is that if you want a list of options, choose from the regular (non Q) options. With Q, you tell them what you are looking for and they come up with solutions

So you get out of the process as much as you put in

I put in a lot. An awful lot. A handful of visits to Gaydon, a good number of phone calls, many 100s of emails, quite a few samples and then they get to a multi page PDF detailing everything, which by V2 or V3 included pricing. In the end we finalised on V5. Some time was saved overall because of the commonality between my car, Ian's & Grahams but then it was added to with the thousands of private emails between the three of us ! Plus there were areas we all had to agree on. Although I don't recall actually disagreeing on anything and we have all added t the process creatively, so none of our cars would have been what they are without all three of us being involved

One area that's really difficult to get your head around is that you seldom get even a rough estimate of price til you formalise the request (which you can then reject). So you spend time, including their time, detailing ideas which if you knew from the start cost £x, you wouldn't spend further time on. That certainly adds to the timeline a lot. Especially as many things can't be quoted in isolation - the cost of my contrast lined glovebox for instance might be different to someone else having the same item, as depending what else we are each having done, that could make our item cheaper or more expensive through economies of scale etc

It certainly all seems worthwhile now that we are receiving photos of some of the Q work in progress, either just to keep us updated or for final approval - some of the graphics for instance are applied using masking tape by hand, where I get to see what they have done in a photo with the masking, say yay or nay, then they paint

And yes, very much exciting times

I’m actually at the stage where I’m really enjoying the whole process so much . The snippets of detail about my car coming back from Q make you realise all those hours of discussions, e mails and factory visits have actually bought us to the start of building (for me) a very special car . Jonathan has indicated we have been on this very long journey together which has been really special and we are now close to the end game . Three totally different cars but with so much in common . Good things come to those that wait is a tad of an understatement . Roll on Spring 2018.

[jonby]

silverspeed said:

I’m actually at the stage where I’m really enjoying the whole process so much .

absolutely agree

it's a little like building a house - a good chunk of the way through, you suddenly get to the stage where the rate of progress seems to have ramped up exponentially, which is the stage we are at now

Also, some of our frustrations were because of an unusual mix of factors - I don't think it helped having Q on a ltd ed car as the ink hadn't really dried on the AMR spec sheets when we were dealing with Q so just working out precisely what the base spec was on which we were having Q was not easy for any of the parties concerned. On top of that, our journey started a long time before we even realised our base cars would be AMRs, in Feb 2016

But the work both Q and others at Gaydon have put in has been phenomenal and as Graham indicates, now that we can really see the fruits of that work in a very tangible sense, we are looking at it differently to when it was just seemingly endless discussions and emails. Of course much of all that was because we were so demanding and pedantic. Well I say 'we'.......I'm not sure I wasn't the worst in that respect :-)

Going back to the house building analogy, rather like once a house is built & furnished, I'm not sure what I'll do with my time once this project is finished !

[Jon39]

I have a picture in my mind of the staff at Q, receiving those hundreds of emails, visits, phone calls, and five versions of PDF.

Did they include a charge for staff aspirins?

No wonder they quote prices at the end of the process.

Pleased to hear many compliments about Q these days. Some time ago there were comments about them being fairly uncooperative. They must have worked out the right balance now, to be a helpful and profitable department.

[jonby]

Jon39 said:

Pleased to hear many compliments about Q these days. Some time ago there were comments about them being fairly uncooperative. They must have worked out the right balance now, to be a helpful and profitable department.

There is far less of the 'that can't be done' of a few years ago - I've always said the answer to any request should be 'certainly sir', leaving the customer to be the judge of whether the price can be justified, as essentially almost anything can be done, it's simply a matter of what the charge will be.

It's far from perfect, but it certainly is not uncooperative. But the reality is, anything bespoke or custom in any walk of life tends to be an incredibly long drawn out process which doesn't suit everyone and by definition, is difficult to fit into standardized systems

[ajr550]

Sounds like Q is now "Tailor Made".Funny that, where can the idea have come from ?

Edited by ajr550 on Thursday 21st December 22:34

[IanV12VR]

Been on the road so missed out on this flurry of emails.

It has been a fantastic but frustrating at times process but I do think we will end up with some very individual cars with some common themes. Indeed in the last few weeks it is like having an advent calendar as various parts have come through for final approval. Unfortunately Graham and Jonathan have a few more to approve than me but there again mine has cost a bit less but only a bit.

It’s hard to believe that all this started nearly three years ago and now only a very few months to wait. My build starts in February and then hopefully another trip to Gaydon to see her being built! Hopefully when I visit I will be able to catch up with a few of the people that have brought all this to what I know will be fantastic cars. Quite a process!

As has become our motto “Good things come to those who wait”

Edited by IanV12VR on Thursday 21st December 22:25

[Speedraser]

Gettoff said:

Jon39 said:

Perhaps I am old fashioned, but do you think this can be overdone?

Where do you stop?
Maybe every other wheel spoke, highlighted in lime accents would be worth trying.

It's strange really, in the other thread about the new Vantage almost to a person everyone is extolling the virtues of the 'old' Vantage . Not a bad angle in site, understated beauty, elegant design, classic grille etc. etc. all been mentioned...

Yet this looks plain tacky and has taken a massive beating with the Halfords stick. Odd.

The comments about the beautiful design of the "old" Vantage refer, I believe, to the "standard" Vantage models. The GT8/12, AMR, etc. cars are the standard car taken to extremes, which makes sense since understated elegance and beauty clearly aren't the point of the extreme versions. IMO, the Vantage shape is best as it was originally, like "perfect" designs often are. DB4, XK120, E-type S1 are other examples. The New Vantage, however, seems to have abandoned understated elegance and beauty.

[seastorm]

PJDV8 said:

Spotted this from Aston Martin Works on Facebook this morning.

Some interesting additional lime accents that they've applied to a V12VAMR in Halo with full aero.

[url]

Saw this - or an identical car to it - drive through Notting Hill yesterday afternoon. Sounded very nice, looked good, apart from the wing which just looked a touch OTT for a road going AM.

[LordBretSinclair]

PJDV8 said:

Spotted this from Aston Martin Works on Facebook this morning.

Some interesting additional lime accents that they've applied to a V12VAMR in Halo with full aero.

[url]

Is it just me or does this car look like it is riding too high???
I know I'm a bit biased as I like my Aston to look a bit more "planted"

[Phil74891]

LordBretSinclair said:

PJDV8 said:

Spotted this from Aston Martin Works on Facebook this morning.

Some interesting additional lime accents that they've applied to a V12VAMR in Halo with full aero.

[url]

Is it just me or does this car look like it is riding too high???
I know I'm a bit biased as I like my Aston to look a bit more "planted"

Must be the wing creating lift 😬

That AMR would look brilliant with just the yellow grille accent and stripe. Carbon mirrors, and one less wing.