Aston Martin V8 Vantage Series 1

William Towns had already shaped the DBS that the V8 saloon grew from, and for the Vantage he added purely functional aerodynamic addenda rather than a new silhouette. A deep front air dam and a fully blanked-off grille, housing twin Cibie driving lights instead of the standard car's opening, fed cooling air from beneath the bumper and cut front end lift at a genuine 170mph. A sealed bonnet bulge, bolted on as a separate cover on the very first cars and welded shut on every one after, cleared the taller inlet trunking needed for the enlarged Weber carburettors underneath. At the back, a boot-lid spoiler did the same job in reverse, and the way it was fitted is the detail that splits the whole Series 1 production run: bolted to the decklid after painting on the first sixteen cars, moulded into the bodywork itself on the twenty-three built after. Inside, black vinyl covered the dashboard and top roll rather than the walnut veneer fitted to lesser V8s, a deliberate decision by Aston Martin, who felt a genuinely fast driver did not need a reflective wood surface catching the light in front of them.

The roadgoing Vantage itself never had a factory competition programme, and the closest thing to one belongs to a different car wearing the same badge. Robin Hamilton, an Aston Martin dealer and privateer racer, built RHAM/1 from a standard V8 saloon rather than a genuine Vantage, fitting Nimonic valves, forged Cosworth pistons and a redesigned sump to extract around 520bhp, and took it to Le Mans in 1977 with tacit factory support, finishing 17th overall and third in the GTP class with Hamilton sharing driving duties with Mike Salmon and David Preece. The same car returned in 1979 and retired with a broken connecting rod after less than three hours. It is a genuinely significant part of the V8's competition story, and worth knowing about, but it should not be confused with the production Series 1 Vantage covered here: RHAM/1 was a one-off, purpose built racing special, not a tuned version of the road car. Away from Le Mans, early customer cars did see amateur competition almost immediately, the second production Vantage built was racing at an AMOC club meeting within months of leaving the factory, but this was owner enthusiasm rather than anything Aston Martin organised or supported.

When the Vantage arrived in 1977, the British press did something it had not done for a home grown car in years: it compared Aston Martin favourably to Ferrari and Lamborghini on straight-line terms, and largely won the argument. Contemporary testers rated the new car's performance ahead of the Lamborghini Countach, the Ferrari 512BB and the Porsche 911 Turbo, and the Britain's first supercar tag stuck immediately and has followed the model ever since. That reputation did more for Aston Martin's standing through a genuinely difficult decade for the British motor industry than any single sale figure could. The Vantage name itself went on to a much longer cultural life than this specific car: Aston Martin revived it in 2005 for an entirely different, smaller model that still carries the badge today, and a later, visually distinct Vantage Volante appeared as James Bond's car in 1987's The Living Daylights. Neither of those later chapters belongs to the Series 1 coupe described here, but both trade on the credibility this car built first, the moment Aston Martin proved it could still build something genuinely fast.

There is no single best Series 1, but there is a clear pecking order. The sixteen Bolt-On Fliptail cars, built between February and mid 1977 with a rear spoiler bolted to the decklid after the body was painted, are the earliest and rarest expression of the model and command the strongest premium among specialists. The twenty-three Moulded Fliptail cars that followed integrated that spoiler into the bodywork at the factory, along with a bonnet bulge welded shut rather than bolted over, and are the more usable, slightly more finished version of the same car. Both share the full Vantage tune 375 to 380bhp engine, breathing through four 48mm Weber carburettors. A further thirteen cars, built to US specification and sold as Cosmetic Vantages, wear the same aerodynamic bodywork and badges but were never fitted with the high output engine, running instead on the emissions compliant tune of the standard V8 saloon; they are the way to own the look without the performance, and priced accordingly. All thirty-nine full spec cars came exclusively as a five speed manual coupe: there was no factory Volante or automatic option until much later in the model's life.

The mechanical side of a Series 1 Vantage is honest, old-fashioned engineering, and most of what goes wrong is well understood. Four twin-choke Weber carburettors need periodic balancing to run cleanly, and a car that has sat without proper tuning will idle roughly and flat-spot on acceleration until someone who knows Webers goes through it properly. The Lucas electronic ignition and wiring are typical of the period and want a specialist's attention rather than a generic auto electrician's. Cooling can run marginal in slow traffic or hot climates, a direct consequence of the blanked-off grille that gives the car its look, so a healthy radiator and correctly working fan are worth confirming before a summer road trip. The real structural risk sits where you cannot see it: the steel platform chassis beneath the handbuilt aluminium body panels corrodes in the same places as any British car of this era, and because the bodywork does not rust, it is easy for a seller, or even an owner, to be unaware of what is happening underneath. None of this makes the car difficult to own day to day. It makes it a car that rewards buying from a specialist and servicing with one, rather than treating it like an ordinary vintage sports car.