Aston Martin Vulcan

The name came first and it came from an aeroplane. Aston Martin took it from the Avro Vulcan, the delta-winged V bomber, and made the connection explicit in October 2015 by photographing the car alongside XH558, the last airworthy example, weeks before that aircraft's final flight on 28 October. Andy Palmer, then chief executive, said plainly that the bomber had provided the inspiration for the name. Marek Reichman's shape is the One-77's visual language pushed until it stops being a road car. Everything on it is doing aerodynamic work: the vast front splitter, the louvres over the arches, the sculpted flanks, the diffuser, the wing. The grille is still recognisably an Aston Martin grille, and that is close to the only concession the design makes. Inside there is no attempt at luxury and no pretence of one. A carbon tub, a racing wheel with the controls on it, an FIA cage bonded into the structure, and switchgear for the adjustable ABS and traction control. The genuinely interesting decision is that a car with these proportions still reads as an Aston Martin at all.

This is the strange part. The Vulcan was built as a race car and then handed to owners with nowhere to race it, because Aston Martin never homologated it for anything. No GT3, no GTE, no class in any championship in the world was written for a 24-car, 820 bhp track special. The driver development programme existed precisely because the obvious alternative, a one-make series, did not. One owner went and did it anyway. Glebs Stepanovs bought a Vulcan AMR Pro, had Venture Engineering run it, and put it on a grid: first at Britcar's Spa-Francorchamps double-header in 2020, then as an invitational entry in the 2021 Britcar Endurance Championship, where sitting outside the regulations meant the car could lead a race outright and still score nothing. He and co-driver Steve Tomkins then ran full seasons in 2022 and 2023 in the British Endurance Championship's Class A, against GT3 machinery. That remains the whole record. One car, one owner, and no championship the Vulcan was ever eligible to win.

Almost nobody has seen a Vulcan move. Twenty-four cars, no road registration and no race series means the public sightings are countable: the Geneva stand in March 2015, Darren Turner running it up the Goodwood hill that summer for its dynamic debut, a handful of track days, and the Britcar grids. So the car did most of its cultural work in games. It is a hero car in the Forza series, with both the standard car and the 2017 AMR Pro playable, and it turns up in Real Racing 3 and Need for Speed Unbound. A generation of people know exactly how a Vulcan sounds and have never been within a mile of one. The image that lasted is the October 2015 shoot with Vulcan XH558. Two British deltas photographed together on an airfield, one of them weeks away from its last flight and the other with nowhere in particular to go either. Aston Martin has rarely made its own case that well.

Owning a Vulcan is a logistics problem more than a mechanical one. There is no scenario in which you simply drive it. It goes on a truck, it comes off a truck, and somebody who understands a sequential gearbox and a dry-sumped race V12 is there when it does. Most owners run theirs through a specialist or through Aston Martin's own operation, and the day rate is the real running cost, not the parts. Mechanically the car is a race unit doing race-car things. Carbon ceramics, competition rubber, a V12 in a state of tune for which Aston Martin has never published a service interval publicly, and DSSV dampers that want checking rather than ignoring. Nothing about it was designed to sit still, which is awkward, because most of the 24 do exactly that. A car showing delivery mileage after a decade has fluids, seals and batteries that have aged without ever having been worked. None of this is unusual for a customer race car. It is only unusual for something wearing an Aston Martin badge, and owners who came at it from the race side tend to find it entirely normal.