The metro cop on the Grayston offramp to the M1 in Sandton had been bored for half an hour. Despite the occasional overloaded taxi and scatterbrained housewife who had forgotten to strap herself in, nothing much had happened. Thus, when my Aston Martin Vantage Roadster drove down the ramp, he almost wet himself.
With a flourish of arm twists and gestures he forced me off the road and breathlessly asked for the papers of the car. Then he wanted a demonstration. “You have made my day,” he said, as he waved me along with a smile as powerful as the V8 engine of the car.
Of course, I too had been doing cartwheels when informed that I would be taking the sexy blue roadster for a spin. All my friends around me gasped jealously at the news. The car tends to have that effect on most people upon mention of its name. My father, who had just acquired a piece of nifty road hardware himself, had a huge grin on his face and enquired whether it was at all possible to bring the car around for a minute or two.
My husband immediately put in leave for the afternoon when he heard about the car. He kept muttering to himself that he did not mind being a kept man if he could even just be a passenger.
From the moment I got in the car, I felt something different. Maybe it was the respect everyone in a BMW, Audi, Mercedes and even a Porsche afforded me. In my normal Renault Clio, I tend to have idiots tailgating me, even when travelling at 140km/h. At 120km/h on the freeway, no one even got close to the car. Everywhere people smiled and did neck twists to examine the beautiful Aston Martin.
Another interesting experience I had was with an old, souped-up BMW stopping next to me at a robot, clearly looking for a race. From the confidence of this guy, it was clear he had raced many times before and had won most of them. The sound of his engine clearly indicated that he had the power to back his confidence. But the Vantage roadster roared once and the red BMW became a small dot in the distance behind me. The specs say 0-100kph happens in five seconds and I can confirm that this is not merely a sales pitch.
The car clearly has the hardware to beat most cars on the road. Its 4,2-litre V8 engine can purr like a kitten and roar like a lion at the mere command of the driver. In fact, for such a powerful sports car, its handling in peak traffic as well as normal Johannesburg traffic was astoundingly easy.
Its 283 kW sometimes even frightened my power junkie of a husband and its 410Nm is truly astonishing. Though we never even came close to its top speed of 280km/h, we were intrigued to see the speedometer marked all the way up to 330km/h.
Ironically, this R1,7-million car is the cheapest in the Aston Martin stable. But you are not merely paying for the power and performance. You are paying for a piece of art, because everything from the radio to the upholstery will give anyone a feeling of pure pleasure. The label that says “Hand assembled in England” already gives you a hint that this is no ordinary vehicle.
Even though it is very much an English car, it does not have the stuffiness of a stiff-upper lip designed vehicle at all. I love the white stitched leather and the whole chrome effect of the car. My only complaint was that I had to use a pillow for my short legs to reach the accelerator.
After picking up my smiling husband, we eventually left the traffic behind and took a few turns on the side roads surrounding Pretoria. But even then we were a bit scared to take up the car to its full potential.
Returning the car to the dealership again, I was caught in a huge traffic jam on the N3. The car slowly snaked its way through the pedestrian traffic, never reaching a speed above 10km/h. It was quite a slow end to what had been a very fast afternoon.