Aston Martin Vantage Roadster review

No pressure, but it’s the latest car aiming to continue Aston Martin’s red-hot run of recent form. The DB12 is a vast improvement on the ’11. The new Vanquish is a better hyper-GT than a Ferrari 12Cilindri. And when we met the overhauled hard-top Vantage, the character shift from AMG-leftovers to utter hotrod was mind-blowing.

Question is, would Aston turn down the volume for a more relaxed, refined, raffish soft-top Vantage Roadster? Or crank the knob until it broke off? Yep, it’s the latter. If you want to buy a genteel open-top cruiser, try a pedalo.

It looks… angry.

Indeed, this isn’t even a classically elegant Aston. The latest Vantage’s pumped-out haunches are accentuated on the roadster because of its flat rear deck. The car’s almost four-square wide and looks like it’s planted into the road on concrete foundations.

With the roof up, it’s not pretty from the rear. Its oddly angular hood and sheer volume of metal muscle underneath make it look like a tank: chassis and turret, albeit with the big gun replaced by four rearward chromed rocket-launchers.

But with the roof motored away into a recess behind the strict two-seat cabin – a record-breaking 6.8 second process you can deploy at up to 31mph – the Roadster evolves into a classically correct shape. Long bonnet, pert tail, well-filled wheelarches.

But heavier and slower than the coupe, right?

It’s all relative. The hard-top Vantage is hardly a lithe blowaway featherweight sort of car, and thanks to Aston Martin’s new-found obsession with making every car it builds the most powerful in its class, a 60kg increase in kerbweight (to 1,665kg bone dry) isn’t disastrous. In fact, it’s meaningless. Nail a clean launch and you’ll go from 0-62mph in 3.5 seconds – exactly as fast as the Vantage coupe. It doesn’t stop accelerating until it’s on the exciting side of 200 miles an hour. ‘Entry-level’ and ‘baby Aston’ aren’t really terms that apply here.

It’s a rocketship, and feels every bit as barely-contained furious as the fixed-roof version. Character is in abundance… but this is not the most professional, foolproof support-sports car you can buy for £200,000. This meathead demands respect long before a 911 Turbo starts wagging its finger and tutting.

Remind me what’s going on underneath.

Aston Martin completely reworked the Vantage back in early 2024 leaving almost nothing untouched. In addition to a badly needed interior rethink, the 4.0-litre AMG V8 sprouted bigger turbos with a clever ‘boost reserve’ function to improve throttle response. Cooling was critical for the monster power hike to succeed, so Aston’s smallest car now sports a very big mouth. The result? 656bhp and 590lb ft. And it’s the least powerful Aston in the family!

Unlike its key rivals from Porsche, Maserati and AMG, there is no semi-electrified (or fully EV) version. You like to imagine the brochure reads ‘V8 or GTFO'.

The eight-speed automatic gearbox had its ratios trimmed for more relentless acceleration, though in our experience of the coupe the changes promised for sharpening up the shifts didn’t go far enough. And the same rings true here.

Wondering why it looks so much beefier? There’s a 30mm stretch in track widths, required to make the most of handling upgrades brought about by adaptive Bilstein DTX dampers (well, if they’re good enough for the Porsche 911) and an e-diff buried directly into that rear-mounted gearbox. That’s what’s so compelling about the new Vantage.

It’s as though Aston’s engineers benchmarked the white-hot pace of a 911 Turbo S, a Ferrari Roma’s balletic agility and the thunderous gentrified muscle car character of a Merc-AMG GT… and then thought ‘ah, to heck with making a whole range of models. Let’s inject all of the above into one car'.

What a ride Aston’s on right now. Where will it end? Surely the cars can’t continue on this trajectory of aggression and power? Ah well, if history teaches us anything about Aston Martin it’s not to worry about the near future. Just revel in the now, because right here, at this moment, Aston Martin’s road cars have never been in such a rich seam of form.

The Vantage Roadster epitomises where the company is right now. Not perfect, but vastly improved. Not the last word in precision or sophistication, and sometimes frustrating for that. But spend ten minutes in one of these and you’ll want to pin a George Cross on the chest of every single person responsible, for being brave enough to create a car this over-endowed in power, character and good-natured spirit in 2025.

In a world where handling or lightness was the top-dollar sports car currency, this new Vantage would have 450-500bhp. And it might well be a better road car for it, wearing slightly narrower tyres, riding with a touch more composure when the throttle is pinned and the rear end is under load, desperately trying to convert the driver’s greedy wishes into controlled onward progress.

But that’s not the world we live in. This is an ice-cream sundae with all the sprinkles, sauces and sparklers. It’s a nine-song encore after the noise curfew with a 14-minute guitar solo. There’s a sense of ‘is all this strictly necessary’ about the Vantage. And the answer is no, it isn’t. Which is exactly why it’s so fantastic.