WARNING: this article may contain pictures of non-Aston cars. Proceed at your own risk! Last week, we found that famous automotive photographer Gijs Spierings was looking for some super cars for a photo shoot on Saturday. Strangely enough, we didn’t have a car event planned that day yet :-), so we agreed to bring our red V12 Vantage to the shoot.
Every year in June, the dutch Aston Martin club Power Beauty Soulmates goes on a week-long trip to a beautiful location in Europe. Preferably a place with lots of beautiful roads for us to drive. Previous trips took us to Le Mans, Isle of Man, the italian Dolomites and last year to Scotland. This year, we will go to Biarritz, France, a perfect starting location for nice routes in the French and Spanish Pyrenees. So last week, my friend Eduard and I spent 4 days in Biarritz, to plan the routes and to scout lunch and diner locations. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it 🙂
Here’s a quick video my wife shot on the Autobahn, while driving back from the Nürburgring 2 weeks ago. Me and my wife in my blue V12 Vantage Roadster chasing a friend driving my red V12 Vantage, on the German Autobahn. Reaching speeds up to 270 km/h. Fun!
Last week, on Tuesday, I participated in the Aston Martin on Track day on the Nürburgring GP Strecke. Since I was driving on the track most of the day, the only photos I was able to make (and included in my report of the day) were rather static pit-lane photos. Luckily, Aston Martin had several professional photographers document the entire day and I have just received a large batch of nearly 300 photos. I am going through them now, making a selection for an upcoming “Astons on the track” post. But for now, here’s some photos of my Fire Red V12 Vantage on the track (these were easy to spot as it was the only red Aston present 🙂 ):
It finally happened, my first track day in an Aston Martin! Last Tuesday, this year’s series of Aston Martin Big 5 events was kicked off with the track day at the Nürburgring. A last minute sign up (monday morning!) and suddenly I found myself driving my V12 Vantage on the GP Strecke, together with 30 other Aston Martins.
At last Saturday’s Spring Event, a nice piece of tarmac had been prepared for drifting. So I took the Fire Red monster and tried my best. I have some experience with drifting, in several different cars (Porsches, several different Astons, my BMW 1M, etc…) and have become moderately good at it. I had never tried in a V12 Vantage though, so this was an excellent opportunity. However, it turned out that this certainly isn’t the easiest car to do a controlled drift in. The short wheelbase, the enormous amount of torque from the V12 on the rear wheels… Even my drift-instructor had trouble getting this beast under control on the wet tarmac. Anyway, here’s a video of my attempts, shot by TwinCharched, using two GoPro camera’s attached to the car, combined with some external footage.
The Big 5 is Aston Martin’s yearly series of 5 “experience” events. It includes three track days (at Silverstone, the Nürburgring and Spa-Francorchamps) and two driving-experience days (one at the Boxberg test center and one on-ice event in St. Moritz). This Monday (September 17) the fifth Big 5 event was held: the track day at Spa-Francorchamps. Over eighty Aston Martins came to this historic race-track in Belgium. 66 Aston owners taking their own car to the track, others renting a factory car for the day.
It’s a Sunday, no Aston Martin news today. So here’s some pictures I took yesterday of my own V12 Vantage (in Fire Red) posing with his little open top brother, my V8 Vantage S Roadster (in Stratus White).
This week I gave my British beauties a nice cosmetic upgrade with some extra carbon fibre goodies. On both my Vantage S Roadster and my V12 Vantage the regular chrome side strakes have been replaced with carbon fibre side strakes. On top of that, the V12 Vantage was fitted with a carbon fibre gearshift surround, again replacing the regular chrome unit.
Hi there and welcome to aston-martin.com! Let me introduce myself first: I am Alwin. I am an Aston Martin fan and the proud owner of two of these British beauties (I will tell you more about my own Aston’s in future posts). My day job is running a software company and managing its’ many websites. But next to that, my wife and I run the website of the dutch Aston Martin owners club Power Beaty Soulmates. And it’s through my work for that PBSM site that I found out that I really like writing about my passion: fast and beautiful cars, and Aston Martin in particular. I figured, why not take my writing one step further and create my own car blog site. One that is completely focused on Aston Martin only. So I got hold of the “aston-martin.com” domain, created this blog and here we are! My plan is to post Aston Martin news and rumors, plus reviews of Aston’s I have driven. All from the perspective of an Aston Martin owner and intermixed with my personal Aston story. But to be honest, I have no idea where this is going and how it will turn out. Let’s just get started and take it from there 🙂 I hope you will like my Aston related ramblings. Let me know what you think in the Comments sections!