Vanquish resurrected by Aston Martin with mid-engine

Aston Martin’s Vanquish Vision concept previews a mid-engine rival to supercars such as the Ferrari F8 Tributo and McLaren 720S.

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The company said in a news release that the car resurrects the Vanquish name, previously used on the company’s flagship front-engine GT car, and it’s production will begin in 2022.

Aston aims to sell around 1,400 a year of the production car, which will make it one of the automaker’s best-selling sports models, it said in its share prospectus last year. The concept was unveiled at the Geneva auto show.
Aston Martin starts production of its first mid-engine car, the 2.4 million-pound ($3.16 billion) Valkyrie hypercar, later this year and will follow that in 2021 with a lower-spec hypercar codenamed AM-RB 003. The 003 was also unveiled in concept form at the Geneva show. Aston has said both models were partly created to establish Aston Martin as a credible maker of mid-engine cars, an area it has not competed in before.

The Vanquish will use new V-6 gasoline engine designed in-house by Aston that will debut in hybrid and turbocharged form on the AM-RB 003 hypercar. No performance figures were given.

Aston said the Vanquish Vision concept “showcases the design language” of the new model ahead of its launch. It borrows elements of the Valkyrie to make the link with the hyper car such as the gaping air intake at the front, but has less of the “negative space” that make the Valkyrie and the AM-RB 003 look so extreme. “It’s a prettier car, and purposely so, as it’s been designed to thrive in a less extreme performance envelope,” Miles Nurnberger, Aston Martin Director of Design said in a statement. He described it as less “provocative and more classical” in its look.

Unlike the Valkyrie and the 003 hypercars, the Vanquish’s chassis will be built from aluminum instead of carbon fiber.

Aston Martin last year quoted figures from IHS Markit showing the mid-engine supercar market is expected to grow by 40 percent between 2018 and 2023. Aston Martin’s predictions for the car are modest given Ferrari sells around 5,000 a year of the 488, the car the F8 replaces, Max Warburton, an analyst at Bernstein bank, wrote in a report published earlier this year.

He predicted Aston will sell a cheaper version at around 150,000-200,000 pounds and a higher end model priced between 250,000-300,000 pounds, but noted most of the sector growth was coming at the lower priced end. “The number of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) is growing, but in most places they are getting older, and don’t want to (or aren’t able to) sit low in a loud sports car,” he said.