Aston Martin V12 Speedster

Miles Nurnberger's team started from two 1950s sports racers and a concept nobody could buy. The twin humps behind the seats come from the DBR1 and the DB3S. The proportions, and the idea of a road car with nothing above the waist, come from the CC100 Speedster Concept built in 2013 for Aston Martin's centenary. Over that they layered aviation references, the F/A-18 in particular, which is where the nostril in the bonnet and the canopy-shaped buttress covers come from. The body is carbon fibre and shares nothing with the Vantage underneath it. The grille is wider and lower than anything else in the range, the headlights are unique to this car, and the exhaust exits centrally into the diffuser. The wheels are 21-inch forged centre-locks over carbon ceramic discs, 410 mm at the front and 360 mm at the rear. Inside is where the bespoke division shows. Structural satin carbon, saddle leather, chrome, aluminium and 3D-printed rubber, and no glovebox at all: a removable leather bag does that job, with more storage under the humps.

There is none, and the reason is worth stating plainly, because the car is dressed as a racer. The V12 Speedster was built by Q by Aston Martin as a road object. It has no roof, no windscreen and no roll structure any scrutineer would pass, and no series exists for what it is. The architecture underneath did race, but not with this engine. When Aston Martin built the Vantage GTE, GT3 and GT4 from 2018 it used the Mercedes-AMG 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8, and the GT3 explicitly replaced the naturally aspirated V12 Vantage GT3 that came before it. The GT regulations of the period were written around that V8, so the AE31 twin-turbo V12 in this car has never been homologated for anything. What the Speedster has instead is a reference. The DBR1 whose colours the special specification wears won the 24 Hours of Le Mans outright in 1959 with Carroll Shelby and Roy Salvadori driving. That is the racing history in this car: borrowed, acknowledged and entirely secondhand.

The V12 Speedster's public life has been about the paint rather than the car. The Top Gun: Maverick specification landed in 2022 alongside the film, with Maverick's helmet design painted inside the buttresses and a Capt. Pete Mitchell decal on the door, and it remains the version most people have seen. Hot Wheels put the car into its Premium range, which is a decent proxy for how a shape is travelling outside the enthusiast press. Inside the enthusiast press the reception was more complicated, and evo's verdict is the one worth repeating: a much better car than the writer had expected, and the first Aston Martin he had ever driven that he had no desire to own. That is not a dismissal. It is an accurate description of a car built for a particular buyer. There is even a small aftermarket in windscreens, a two-piece canopy using the factory mounting points, which is either heresy or common sense depending on where you live.

Everything about owning one starts with the fact that there is no roof. There is no windscreen either, so the car cannot live outside, cannot be driven in rain in any comfortable sense, and needs a helmet above about 60 mph. Owners plan around forecasts. That is the specification rather than a defect, but it is the reason most of these cars have covered almost no distance. The consequences are the familiar ones for a low-use exotic. Fluids, tyres, batteries and air conditioning are what want attention on a car that has been stored rather than driven, and a Speedster that has done a genuine few thousand miles is more interesting than one that has done fifty. Underneath, the news is good, and it is what separates this car from the One-77 and the Valkyrie. The engine, the gearbox, the electronics and most of the running gear are shared with cars Aston Martin built in the thousands, so a fault is diagnosable and a part usually exists. Only the carbon bodywork is unique, and that is the part you protect.