What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

Prepare your moobs for a workout ^{Aston Martin Virage}

If you want to spend a lot of money on a house, there is a very large list of options. It could be in France or Florida. It could be old or new. It could be nestling on a bed of gravel in the Cotswolds or surrounded by a turquoise moat in Alderley Edge.

It’s the same story with restaurants and art and furniture and holidays. Money buys you choice. Unless you are planning on buying a car. Because when you are rich enough to take a seat at the top table in petrol heaven, there’s no choice at all.

You want a big, fast BMW. It’ll be uncomfortable. You want a big, fast Mercedes. It’ll be uncomfortable. You want a Ferrari or a Maserati or a Porsche. Uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. All of them have suspension made from concrete and tyres with the give of an African warlord.

The fact of the matter is this: with the exception of footballers and tennis players, most people who have enormous lumps of money to spend on a car are in their forties or fifties. They’ve done their time sleeping on chairs after parties and kipping on the floor because they can’t afford a taxi home. What they want, at all times, is to be comfy, to have a nice sit-down, to relax.

But the car makers have got it into their heads that this simply doesn’t apply when you’re coming home from work. No. The car makers think that you want to feel every ripple and every catseye. They think you want seats with the cushioning of a kitchen chair. They think that you want to feel at all times like you’re going for a lap record at the Nürburgring.

If the designers at AMG made sofas, they’d be fashioned from gravel and would come with spikes.

The new BMW range of luxury carpet: ‘Made from Lego bricks and upturned plugs.’ And the new Maserati bath: ‘Instead of water, or ass’s milk, we allow our customers to soak away the strains of the day, up to their necks in sulphuric acid.’

It’s bonkers, and you can see what’s going on. Car makers want their cars to be liked by Autocar magazine, and what Autocar likes is fast lap times. Engineers like fast lap times, too, because that shows they are better engineers than the idiots at BMW, whose cars are slower. It’s all just one big peeing competition, with you and me playing the part of the suckers with the chequebooks.

This brings me to Aston Martin. In the beginning it made the DB9, and we saw that it was pretty good. It rode as if it had been designed for the road, not the Nürburgring. But instead of making the new, smaller car – the Vantage – in the same mould, Aston’s boffins decided it should be more uncomfortable. And then, when they fitted that with a bigger, V12 engine, they decided that it should be more uncomfortable still. And then along came the DBS, in which they did away with the suspension altogether and fitted steel girders.

You would imagine that this would cause the marketing department at Jaguar to think, Aha. Now that Aston Martin has decided to make a range of racing cars, we see an opportunity, so let us soften the supercharged XKR. Because there are many middle-aged men with moobs and very wide bottoms who might like such a thing.’

’Fraid not. Jaguar decided that anything Aston could do, it could do better. So the current XK rides around on suspension seemingly made from a blend of granite and chest freezers. Run over a pothole in that car and you shatter.

As a result of all this, I had high hopes for the Aston Martin Virage. It was billed as a cheaper, more comfortable version of the DBS. All the style. All the speed. All the lovely interior detailing. But none of the rock-hard, racetrack, carbon-fibre nonsense that no one either needs or wants.

Well, it may have an automatic gearbox but it’s still a bitch. You can tell when you run over a white line whether the paint was gloss or emulsion. You know when you run over a pheasant whether it was a cock or a hen. And you can’t just feel the suspension refusing to budge when it encounters a bit of gravel; you can hear it, too. Raging away with a series of clumps and bangs.

It is a huge missed opportunity. It could have been the only expensive car currently on sale designed for people who actually exist. But it is just as uncomfortable as all the others.

In almost every other way, however, it’s better. With new sills and a new front spoiler, it looks even more beautiful than the DBS. It looks more beautiful than the most beautiful thing you can think of. Especially in deep, dark, last-vestige-of-the-day navy blue. And doubly especially if you go for the convertible version.

What’s more, it’s £25,000 cheaper than the DBS and, really, it’s hard to see why, since the two cars have the same 6-litre V12 engine. It may have been mildly detuned in the Virage, but you still get 490 horsepower, and that’s enough to get you from rest to the wrong side of the national speed limit in 4.6 seconds. Provided you are in the right gear – and the auto box can be a bit dim-witted sometimes – this is a very, very fast car.

It’s even fast at stopping, thanks to carbon ceramic brakes, and, of course, because the suspension and the tyres are so hardcore, it is utterly thrilling to hustle. You’ve never actually seen an Aston being hustled, of course, but if that’s your bag, the Virage is the best of them all. After the V12 Vantage, perhaps.

Drawbacks? Well, behind the wheel it is a bit cramped, and the price you pay for all that design elegance is that the buttons are quite hard to find. And even harder to press if you are on a bumpy road at the time.

The worst thing, though, is the new satnav. Unlike the old system, which only told you where you’d been, this one only tells you to slow down. Constantly, with a series of bongs. If it even thinks there could be a speed camera nearby, off it goes, yelling and panicking.

It may well be, of course, that there’s a button for turning this feature off, but finding that would mean reading the instruction manual. And that’s not going to happen. I’m a man.

What’s more, when I told it I wanted it to go to London, its next question was, ‘What house number?’

We all need the same thing from a satnav system, so why do all car makers give us a choice about how the screen looks or what sort of voice we want? Choices mean submenus, and submenus are for people who live at home with their mums. Submenu people are the only people on earth who don’t actually need satnav because they never go further than the fridge.

So the Virage is a missed opportunity in this respect, too. And yet, I’m afraid I’m completely in love with it. It’s a hard car, and a hard car to operate, and there are those who say that the wheels are coming off Aston’s previously untarnished brand kudos. But get into a Virage in the morning and I guarantee you will feel good. Better than if you were getting into almost anything else.

At the raggedy edge, a Ferrari 458 is more rewarding to drive and a Mercedes SLS is more fun. But both those cars are a bit flamboyant. And that’s where the Aston scores. It isn’t.