It’s been twenty years since Aston Martin, deeply in debt and little more than an automotive anachronism, was swallowed up by Ford empire. Say what you will about Ford’s other British luxury marques, the past two decades have been good ones for Aston.
When Ford acquired the brand, in 1987, Aston sales plunged to as little as 42 cars a year and at one point, keeping the assembly line rolling depended on the sale of a single car to a wealthy — and quite drunk — British aristocrat. These days, Aston’s aspirations are positively mass-market, with an array of new products promising to push volume up near 10,000 cars a year, and the company well in the black for the first time in its 93-year history.
That’ll be good news for the new owners, David Richards, CEO of racing’s Prodrive and Chairman of Aston Martin Racing, and two Kuwaiti banks. They’re investing $925 million to take control of the company, though Ford will maintain ties to its former subsidiary by holding onto a 15-percent, non-controlling stake.
To understand Aston’s transformation, we caught a flight over to Provence, the painfully pretty French countryside where the British marque provided us an opportunity to test drive the all-new V8 Vantage Roadster.
The Vantage coupe made its appearance barely 18 months ago and served as the primary catalyst for the brand’s revival. Like Bentley’s Continental GT, the Vantage provided a new and more affordable entry point for Aston aspirants, roughly doubling sales in the process. The new roadster is likely to conjure up similar magic, based on several days of driving through the narrow, winding lines of the French countryside.
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