Aston's oxymoron

BUILT IN WALES, WITH A BRITISH SOUL AND A GERMAN HEART, THE DBX IS AN SUV FROM A SPORTS CAR COMPANY. AND WHILE CONSPICUOUSLY UNLIKE ANY CAR FROM ITS PAST, IT MUST SUCCEED IF ASTON MARTIN IS TO HAVE A FUTURE

- BEN MILLER 

MOMENT OF clarity number one: if you were asked to create a luxury SUV that drove with the alacrity that the Aston Martin name demands, you might seek to pull together a team and a parts toolkit not dissimilar to those behind this car, the most important Aston in the marque’s history.

The pandemic torpedoed Aston’s original DBX launch plans (set for the perfect light and wide-open spaces of California), leaving ever so slightly less sun-drenched Silverstone to host our first meeting with the car is finished, production-ready guise. Aston has an engineering centre on the Stowe circuit, nestled within the flat-out curves of the Grand Prix track, and I get a guided tour with chief vehicle attribute engineer Matt Becker. We head past banks of studious engineers at their desks, up the complex’s airfield style control tower – “Imagine a couple of deck chairs on the roof for the British Grand Prix” – and on into the bustling pit garage-style workshops.

We pause in the last of these garages, its space filled with dampers hung like Spanish hams and, between them, the equipment to strip and rebuild them. It’s here, where the DBX’s enormous air-sprung shocks dwarf those of the Aston sports car hung nearby, that the enormity of the project – “New platform, new factory, new everything,” says Becker – is made abundantly clear, as is Aston’s exciting combination of big OEM backing and passionate, small-volume agility.