How to bust the LockDown blues

Road trips have a life of their own. That’s only to be expected when you cram a driver, a passenger and a car together for an extended period of time. Each member has their own unique personality, and they unfold as the kilometres disappear beneath the wheels.

Sometimes you learn the expected, like the way the 2021 Aston Martin Vantage Roadster’s usually sticky Pirelli tyres struggle to cope with second-gear corner exits. And sometimes you learn the unexpected like the time photographer Ted almost severed his thumb on a wine glass... When stone-cold sober. Or the time I almost made myself carsick in a Porsche 991-series 911 Carrera 4 on the Old Pacific Highway.

That’s one of the reasons why road trips are so much fun. At Drive, we love a good road trip, the longer the better – up to a point. And we too feel the huge hole they’ve left in our lives as we persevere through lockdowns of one kind or another across Australia.

Road trips have been few and far between since Wuhan bat flu came visiting. Travel is restricted, journeys limited to a handful of kilometres, and Australia’s once porous borders that only mattered during State of Origin time are now Berlin Wall-like in their brutal ambivalence to human suffering and compassion.

Even the free-living, Labor-voting car lovers of Western Australia – one of the states with the fewest restrictions – are not free to leave their own state without a valid border-crossing permit.

But the day when Australians can again wander blissfully around our wonderful country is drawing closer. And when that day comes, what’s your plan?

At Drive, we have work permits that allow us to conduct our jobs in a COVID-safe manner. We take this privilege very seriously. We wear masks at all possible times, minimise contact with others, and sanitise with alcohol so much our hands would fail a breath test.

For this article, I had a COVID test before and after, because this is meant to bring good cheer as we look towards a return to normal, not help COVID-19 worm its way further into our already heavy hearts.

Aston Martin rang. Would we like to road-test the new Vantage Roadster? The thought of saying no did cross our minds. What cruel punishment to have such a characterful GT and be restricted to your neighbourhood...

Then we looked at it another way and asked: where are we eager to go the minute Victoria’s Lockdown 6.0 lifts? Where will we go to reconnect with our favourite Sunday morning roads? Which bakeries will sustain us as we leave before sparrow’s and end up somewhere regional where the chicken parma is so big that a dinner plate cannot contain it? Which tunes will we play to speed us on our way, and who’s riding shotgun as we write another chapter in our road-tripping history?

For me, there was but one choice even though I’ve covered most of Victoria’s great roads in my time. I’ve gone west along the Great Ocean Road to Adelaide. I’ve gone east along the coast to Mallacoota and beyond. I’ve circumnavigated the Grampians and criss-crossed the Snowies more times than I can remember. I’ve done the Hume more than I ever wanted to, and have ticked off every other road to Sydney just to avoid the Hume.

For this trip, we only had a day, and Aston Martin had put a 450km limit on our usage of the Vantage, so we were confined to a 200km radius around Melbourne.

I fell back on an old favourite: the Reefton Spur. This road links Warburton with Marysville and has very little reason to exist. But I’m so glad it does.

Photographer Ted, the Aston Martin, and I started at sunrise at Port Melbourne Lifesaving Club. Ted was getting all gooey for the way the morning sun accentuated the Aston’s attractive curves, so I let him have his moment. After all, my time would come.

This Vantage is a much sexier beast than some of the Astons to wear that name, especially in the 1990s, and for that we must thank designer Ian Callum. His influence on Aston’s current design language is clearly evident, even though he laid those foundations more than 25 years ago with the 1994 DB7 and 2001 Vanquish. 

I particularly like our test car’s combination of Zaffre Blue paint, dark textured 20-inch alloy wheels and dark anodised brake calipers. Gloss-black accents on the front splitter, bonnet vents, side sills, rear diffuser and wing mirrors slim the car visually, giving it both an equine strength and elegance. I’m not sure about the headlights, though, which lack intent and can’t match the aggression the rest of the design exudes.

I was quietly impressed with how the soft-top doesn’t detract from the Aston’s street presence overall. Some convertible tops ruin the rakish roadster beneath with their ungainly, bulging silhouettes, but not this one. That said, the car looks sharper with the roof down – which only takes seven seconds by the way, making this one of the fastest electrically operated soft-tops.

Our test car started life with a $315,650 price tag, but those fancy alloys and blacked-out body parts are part of a $70,000 options haul that also includes premium audio, 16-way electric seats, Alcantara headlining and satin dark chrome interior highlights. So, as we’re looking at it, this Vantage Roadster costs $384,036 plus on-road costs.

For the record, the Mercedes-AMG GT C Roadster carries a $367,276 price tag before options. Does that make a Vantage a relative bargain?

Once Ted put the camera away, we had a decision to make. Normally, we’d grab a coffee to get our energy levels up, but these days every interaction carries risk, so we decide instead to head for the hills. For now, we kept the Vantage’s soft-top in place and let the seat heaters keep us cosy.

Trundling north up Punt Road onto the Eastern Freeway at peak-hour was easier than it’s ever been as the majority of Victorians respect the WFH edict. Trucks and commercial vehicles dominate this usually clogged arterial that today flows freely.

As the kilometres tick by, Ted tells me about the whiz-bang creation his very smart biomedical engineering girlfriend is working on for her Masters' degree that will revolutionise some kind of blood test. He tells me he also studied biomedical science at university but gave up to pursue a career in car photography.

I think of telling Ted that if he returned to medicine, he and his girlfriend could soon buy an Aston Martin Vantage Roadster or two instead of riding shotgun in someone else’s. But... I gave up a career in computer game programming for journalism, so I shut up and look around the Vantage’s cabin.

On first impression, the Vantage’s interior is not as convincing as the exterior. It’s also hard to acclimatise to. Not because of the quality of materials, which is first-rate for a car carrying a $314,650 price tag, right down to the blue double-stitched black leather. The sports seats are supportive and highly adjustable – the side bolsters and base bolsters are all individually adjustable to ensure you stay put against cornering forces.

The problem is the vast array of buttons and the seemingly haphazard way they’ve been scattered over the centre console and dashboard. Our 40-minute transport stage between Melbourne and our first real driving road gives us plenty of time to count the different button types – seven – and decide we don’t like the layout.

For instance, the eight-speed gearbox has individual round buttons for P, R, N and D. That’s okay, but do we need separate toggle switches for door unlock and door lock? There’s a bank of square buttons on each side of where the transmission lever would normally sit, which offer access to traction control and stop-start right next to shortcuts for navigation and telephone. Weird grouping.

Above that is a bank of toggle switches for everything from A/C on/off to map lights on/off, which are flanked in turn by HVAC dials, which are in turn flanked by capacitive touch sensors to turn on seat heaters/coolers.

In the middle of all this sits a Mercedes-Benz type rotary dial for interacting with the classy but outdated infotainment screen, plus a roller-style control for volume. On each side of the transmission tunnel hide the seat controls, and if you’re looking for the roof up/down control, that’s over on the driver’s door.

There are few storage options: narrow pockets on each door, two small cupholders between the occupants, a cubbyhole between the seats and a glovebox. So the (disappointingly cheap-looking) car key goes in a cupholder, our phones in the door pockets, and water bottles that don’t fit the cupholders end up on the floor behind the seats.

But all that nit-picking will soon fade into the background as the Aston shows me why it was made.

The Eastern Freeway quickly turns into the Ringwood Bypass, which siphons us out through Lilydale where the traffic really falls away. Then we turn right towards Warburton and parallel the Yarra River well out of town.

By now the fuel economy reading has dropped from 22L/100km around town to a more palatable 14L/100km. That’s a far cry from the single-figure efficiency common among commuter cars, but the Vantage ain’t no commuter car. It’s a performance roadster, and in case you forget, one prod on the accelerator is enough to remind you – and everyone else around you – as the AMG-sourced twin-turbo V8 barks angrily through a very vocal exhaust.

This 4.0-litre V8 may be the M177 precursor to the M178 410kW unit Mercedes-AMG puts in its own roadster, the GT C, and it may only have 375kW compared to the GT C’s 410kW, but that’s enough to propel the Vantage Roadster from 0–100km/h in 3.8 seconds, and on to a claimed top speed of 305km/h. Neither of those will be verified today, but both seem feasible as we get to know the Vantage’s drivetrain.

Woori Yallock and Yarra Junction come and go as we track the Yarra upstream. Then we’re passing through Warburton where I’d normally stop for another coffee or maybe a toasted sandwich. The main road is devoid of tourists and quieter than I’ve ever seen it, which I imagine some of the locals would love. But I bet the businesses are looking forward to the tourist dollar returning.

After Warburton, we take a short diversion heading up Donna Buang Road. The road is incredibly quiet and we have it all to ourselves, except for a Falcon coming down from the freshwater spring halfway up. This road clearly hasn’t seen much traffic over the last few months, if the bark and leaves strewn across the road that play havoc with the Vantage’s traction are any indications.

For this first short burst of adrenaline, I leave the active dampers in the softest of three settings, but ‘softest’ is purely a relative term. Willow is considered a soft wood, but it’s anything but forgiving in the hands of Glenn Maxwell or Virat Kohli. The Aston’s softest damper setting is wonderful at dispatching freeway miles in comfort, and it provides a firm and well-controlled base for dispatching corners at anything up to eight-tenths too.

As we climb to 1000m above sea level, I play with the drivetrain using the big gear change paddles behind the wheel to discover the wealth of wellie that lives within the rev range. Like much of the cabin’s ergonomics, it’s an uncomfortable relationship at first. Not because of the ZF eight-speed transmission’s gear changes, which are crisp and relatively quick, but because the paddles feel too far from the wheel and they don’t turn with the wheel.

After a while, I decide it’s unnecessary anyway because the engine’s 685Nm of torque gives plenty of shove at anything from 2500rpm up, so I leave the gearbox in third and just ride the torque all the way to the top. But it’s also clear that full throttle around the 5500rpm power peak brings the most fury.

The higher we climb, the more bark and leaves there are covering the road and the colder it gets. Then, just to keep us awake, patches of water linger on many of the corners and the Vantage’s rear shimmies as it searches for grip. The traction control is in full support mode, so nothing ever gets out of shape, but the traction control’s intervention is obvious because the power cuts as we exit the wetter corners.

We get to the water spring and stop for a couple of shots, during which time conversation turns to one of Drive’s (non car testing) team members who suffers carsickness. As we head back down the mountain and the grip improves the further we go, I push the Vantage harder into the corners, enjoying the way it cuts sharply through the bends like a surfer carving down a wave. All that time Ted is looking at his photos in his camera, so clearly he doesn’t get carsick. He tells me he used to many years ago, but for some reason he no longer does.

So I tell him about a time I almost made myself carsick driving a Porsche 911 Carrera 4 up the Old Pacific Highway late one night. Something about the complete lack of vision beyond the narrow tunnel of light provided by the 911’s headlights and the incredible force of its all-wheel-drive traction through corners messed with my inner ear and I had to stop after 15 minutes. It’s never happened since, so it must have been something I ate.

At the bottom of Donna Buang Road, we turn left and head for Reefton, a blink and you’ll miss it town nestled in the Dandenong Ranges. But while you may miss the town, you’ll never forget the road.

The Reefton Spur is basically 20km of corners stacked haphazardly like pancakes at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Most of them are 25km/h, 35km/h and 45km/h, which explains why the road is a mecca for motorcyclists most weekends. But not on the day the Vantage comes to play. On this day we don’t see any other traffic at all.

The Reefton’s road surface is good, much better than Donna Buang’s. There is hardly any leaf litter, which is probably a sign that the wind and rain do a better job of cleaning it. There are no potholes, and the green moss that sometimes creeps onto the road in winter has been burned off by spring’s warming sun.

If you’d asked me back in Melbourne what kind of car suits the Reefton Spur, I’d have chosen a 718 Cayman, a BMW M2 or a Toyota 86 (with aftermarket turbo), all of which have shorter wheelbases and carry less weight than the 1690kg Aston Martin Vantage Roadster.

So, it’s fair to say that the Aston’s abilities on this tightly wound road surprised the hell out of me. We start carefully, feeling our way into a rhythm as the corners came. Again, I try the paddles, and this time I try not to overuse them, instead relying on the Aston’s deep reserves of torque in third and even fourth gear to pull us relentlessly up the mountain.

At the beginning of the Reefton, Ted had started telling me about his flatmate who owns a number of pubs around Melbourne (all of which are sadly closed during lockdown). It took about five or six corners for the Aston’s mighty roar and raucous barking to silence him. On this dry road, the Pirellis’ grip is immense, and the Aston uses that to spring out of the bends like a greyhound out of the blocks.

Steering feel is sublime through the race-style square-ish steering wheel, and the Aston’s 2.7m wheelbase is long enough to impart predictability when the rear end shimmies, but also nimbleness on quick changes of direction between the bends. The chassis’s sweet balance is topped only by the intimacy of the driver controls, which make you feel like you’re conducting an automotive symphony, not piloting a highly strung roadster up a narrow mountain road.

After the first dozen corners, I dial up the most aggressive ‘Track’ setting on both the dampers and drivetrain, and this refined British roadster gets really serious. The ride is noticeably firmer, though still retains enough compliance to dispatch the Reefton’s few imperfections without ruffling our feathers. Throttle response is sharpened, as is the steering’s bite on turn-in, which really empowers you to push the Vantage harder into corners and be more aggressive with the brakes.

Five minutes in and photographer Ted calls a halt for a photo. He climbs up the side of a cliff to get a shot from above with the surefooted grace of a mountain goat that’s missing two legs. Luckily, no thumbs are severed during his ascent or descent, although he does lose a bit of bark off one arm.

Then we’re back in the car, and I suggest lunch at Marysville Bakery. I can already smell the steak and cheese pie I’ll be having along with a chocolate milk and maybe a vanilla slice. And I already know the drive home along the Black Spur will be far more sedate with all that sloshing around in my gut.

But that’s later. For now, we still need to get to Marysville, which means dispatching the second half of the Reefton Spur and then the Woods Point-Marysville road that is another 10km of tight corners followed by 10km of flowing sweepers.

It’s funny how time evaporates when a great road mesmerises you. Everything but the car and the road fade into the background as the Aston and I work together, swooping through one corner after the other, eager to see what comes next.

This is existence simplified. Nothing else matters but the Aston and what I tell it to do. It’s cliched to say it felt like an extension of me, but that doesn’t make it any less true. There is no steering wheel, no accelerator and no brake. I feel hardwired into the machine, Neo-like in my ability to control the Matrix.

On a road like this, some cars feel their size and weight. They feel cumbersome and belligerent, like you’re wrestling a monster to make it go where you want. Not the Vantage. It feels like a dance partner following my lead and deftly hiding my missteps.

The Aston Martin is not the fastest car I’ve ever driven, nor is it anywhere near the most powerful. But it gave me one of the most immersive and enjoyable drives I’ve had in a long time.

Maybe that’s partly due to how long it’s been since I last ‘went for a drive’. But I also know that it’s partly due to the Aston Martin Vantage Roadster; a car that I now know drives as good as it looks.

Anyone hunting for a British Porsche 911 Convertible should not buy the Vantage Roadster, because it’s not that. The Vantage Roadster is visceral, emotive and exhilarating in a way that only a roofless V8 sports car can be. And because of this, we forgive its shortcomings and revel in its largesse.

MORE: Everything Aston Martin