The Brave Pill: Aston Martin V8 Vantage

Our most expensive Pill so far, yet one that still offers a stonking amount of car for the money

While it's impossible to quote in French at the top of a story without looking like a ponce, a large part of Pill's raison d' etre is to highlight the bargain status of some of our riskier investment opportunities. Including some, like this week's, which allow you to ponce things up on the cheap.

Of course, these things are relative. This week's Pill is being offered for more than the combined values of any two of our previous stars. Yet this stealthy-looking Aston is also the cheapest Vantage V8 we could find on sale anywhere in the UK. Indeed, apart from some faded examples of the not-especially loved six-cylinder DB7, it seems to be the cheapest Aston full stop.

There is a reason for that - a six figure mileage which, if the naysayers are to be believed, will cause Helen Lovejoy to swoon and loudly wonder why anybody won't think of the children. 117,000 miles only equates to a modest 8,400 a year for this early 2005 car, and it seems to have been well looked after throughout that time. But in this rarefied part of the market that odometer tally is regarded as stratospheric; the Vantage pretty much has a nun walking behind it ringing a bell and calling out "shame".

The British market has always been strangely blinkered where it comes to leggier exotics, fetishizing ultra low mileage examples which have barely been used and which are likely to have suffered from the lack of exercise. It's different in other countries. I once seriously considered buying a 350,000-mile Mercedes 500E I found on mobile.de, the German vendor of which was offering it for almost exactly the same price as cars that had gone less than half as far, on the basis it had been driven flat-out every day and maintained regardless of cost. But in Blighty we often end up with the strange situation of owners afraid to use their hugely expensive cars for fear of dinging their values.

Our Pill frees its next owner from any such concerns, which could be a truly liberating experience. It also gives the chance to get into an Aston fitted with a proper do-it-yourself manual gearbox; this in the same week that the marque announced the radical innovation of putting a clutch pedal into the £149,995 AMR version of the current Vantage.

This Vantage itself is well on the way to classic status. Introduced in 2005 it had its design attributed to both Ian Callum (who started it) and Henrik Fisker (who finished). When new it won the Car of the Year award from Car Design News, the car stylist's favourite magazine, so it's not hard to see why both men would want to be associated with what remains a spectacularly good-looking car. Even after 14 years the muscular, tightly wrapped contours can turn heads, drop jaws and even get the doormen in swish hotels removing the velvet ropes they use to guard the spot next to the entrance.

Okay, so the interior feels old and short on toys by modern standards, with the fit-and-finish of cabin materials in early cars like this one being distinctly, um, hand-built. The reddish facings of the leather trim in this one won't be to all tastes either, but the view from behind the steering wheel of your own Aston Martin is always one that will take some beating. This one also features the early pop-up satellite navigation system, which has all the graphical dexterity of a bus stop departures board and is a great way of amusing passengers, if not actually receiving meaningful guidance.

The Vantage sits on the same bonded aluminium "VH" architecture which underpinned the DB9, and which - in modified guise - still lies at the heart of the brand's GT models. The engine was based on Jaguar's long-serving AJ-V8, both Jag and Aston were owned by Ford at the time, but this was substantially modified with new quad-cam cylinder heads along with a standard dry sump lubrication syste

When new, the Vantage was (mildy) criticised for lacking the effortless low-down muscle that previous Astons had led reviewers to expect. The V8 makes its full 385hp at a high 7,300rpm and the full 302lb ft of torque only arrives at a peaky 5,000rpm. But hindsight has probably done an interesting number on that one; the idea of a rev-happy naturally aspirated engine that isn't going to try and spit you off when the turbos spool up sounds refreshingly different to the modern sportscar norm, doesn't it?

The engine is generally regarded to be tough, but running costs will be high. Routine servicing can be eye-wateringly expensive on an Aston, even when using a specialist to try and reduce the pain. But Vantages don't rust, will do 20-something mpg when cruising and the manual gearbox shouldn't have the appetite for clutches of the boorish automated Speedshift.

This car seems to have been well looked after with recent clutch, tyre and brake replacements according to the vendor, while the MOT history doesn't highlight anything of significance beyond a partial strike by the lighting system last year. (It does however prove the car has been thoroughly enjoyed, covering an impressive 22,000 miles between March 2016 and April 2017.)

In a world where even the ugly ducking that was the iQ-based Cygnet has now got past £30,000, it's hard not to see this Vantage as something of a steal. As a curly haired TV presenter once asked, "is there a better expression in the English language than 'let's take the Aston'?"

See the original advert here.

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Harry Flashman

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