Announcing your intention at last year's Paris show to build 77 $1.7 million supercars just as the global economy went into freefall, seemingly without a parachute, struck many as the height of folly.
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Fast forward six months and photographer Ian Dawson and I are in Aston's eco-tech styling studio with Design Director Marek Reichman to get an exclusive first look at a car he describes as "being as close to automotive art as we could get."
Ahead of us is the Paris styling buck, but now in all its naked bluish gray glory. The first production version is being hastily built to meet the looming deadline of the Villa D' Este Concours in Italy, where it would win the top design award.
Notwithstanding that I wouldn't see a real car for a few weeks, the clay, even in the design studio's close confines, immediately impresses with its muscular stance. Its proportions are sleek and wide: It's nearly four inches lower than a DBS, yet it's almost 79 in. wide, which should make parking bays at the local JCPenney seem a tad on the tight side. Although it is 4.7 in. shorter than the 186-in.-long DBS, it gains nearly two inches in its wheelbase. "From very early on it had to have perfect proportions and fit inside the Golden Section," explains Reichman (the Golden Section being a rectangle of aesthetically pleasing proportions first proposed by the Greek mathematician Euclid and subsequently used by architects and artists over the centuries).
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"I wanted to send a signal that was about making a beautiful design and from an engineering point of view, above all, it would say 'Look, Aston Martin is at the cutting edge of leading technologies,'" adds Engineering Director Ian Minards.
A key target from the beginning was chassis balance so Minards ordered a V8 Vantage mule to be built with the front suspension moved 2.0 in. forward to bring more of the mass within the car's wheelbase and give program manager Chris Porritt an idea of the car's dynamic potential. "The proportions we were after suit the driving dynamics," Reichman explains. "Getting the engine to sit behind the front wheel center from a dynamic perspective is very important. And what that allows us to do from a visual perspective is to have this glorious bonnet and this fantastic wheel to body relationship and front wheel to windscreen relationship."
Because the engine sits lower in the chassis it means that, for the first time on an Aston, the hood is lower than the fenders. Does that point to a new design direction for the marque? "It's a hint at where we could possibly take it. This will form part of the message of future products in terms of its visual aesthetic," is all that Reichman would concede.
Mechanical Bits
The One-77 is a fusion of high-end technology and traditional craftsmanship and that is illustrated nowhere better than in the sumptuous lines Reichman and his design team have created for the aluminum body. In an echo of how Aston body panels were once hand-beaten and rolled in the days of Newport Pagnell, so is it true of the One-77. This is particularly evident around the front gills and the C-pillars where the metal has been formed into an impossibly complex series of negative and positive forms combined with razor fine lines that can be achieved only through superforming and then hours of hand shaping and finishing the aluminum. Astonishingly, Reichman tells me that not only is the rear deck from C-pillar to C-pillar a single piece of formed aluminum, but so too are the doors, which have elegant, flower stem-like mirrors (that may not meet regulations).
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