With the prerequisite, hype-building montage out of the way, let’s cut to the chase…

This is the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage, the latest in a world-renowned bloodline of sports cars made by the British automaker. While this latest iteration does maintain the iconic profile and general Vantage ethos, AM has done some significant tweaking to make this more potent, more capable and more exhilarating than any of its predecessors.

But fancy press release verbiage and flashy high-def footage only tells so much of the story; so, we soon found ourselves booked on a chain of flights to Seville, Spain, where we got to drive the 2025 Vantage for ourselves and see what all these changes truly add up to.

In my professional opinion, the best place to start is under the hood. Popping the latch, you’re greeted by the sight of a hand-built, twin-turbo, 4.0-liter V8. This unit has been heavily reworked, including larger turbos and increased cooling; and what that translates to is 656 horsepower and 590 lb-ft of torque, an increase of 30% more ponies and 15% more twist, sent to the rear wheels through an eight-speed automatic transmission.

This, along with transmission reworking, delivers punchier acceleration, sprinting to 60 in 3.4 seconds. Give it enough track, and the Vantage will reach a top speed of 202 mph. But more on that soon enough. Because truthfully, the Vantage’s performance gains lie deeper than this roaring V8…

Aston Martin has gone through great efforts to amplify handling and adaptiveness. Under the skin is an evolved aluminum structure, now made stiffer thanks to reworked bracing and clever engineering. Despite the stronger architecture, certain components have actually been made lighter, playing well into the Vantage’s overall 50:50 weight distribution. New adaptive dampers make up the suspension, boasting a greater range of control and responsiveness. And a number of other changes, which we’ll dive into later, give the Vantage a real ad-Vantage on the track.

Yeah, that pun was low-hanging fruit.

Anyway, before we could take the Vantage onto the tarmac, we spent some time with it on the beautiful roads around Seville to prove its daily abilities. Curvy mountain roads with little to no traffic… that’s what the Vantage was built for.

“The morning started with a pretty… we’ll call it easygoing cruise, you know, down the highways, peeking in and out of towns in this beautiful countryside. And yeah, the Aston Martin did perfectly fine; you would expect that. But these roads, these twisty sections, this is what the Vantage is built for. And it’s just incredible to me how you can just kick it up a notch like nothing.

And really, when you’re driving this car, when you’re going on that easygoing cruise, that’s what it’s all about– is knowing you have all that potential. And it starts, for me, under the hood. You just have this snarling V8. No replacement for displacement. I don’t care what anyone says.

But then it even just trickles down to the suspension. You feel every bump and striation. Not uncomfortably so; it’s that sensory kind of reminder that you know when you’re ready to kick it up a notch, the Vantage is going to keep pace.”

There’s no question: The Vantage is an incredibly competent public roads sports car. The most concise way to describe it is “point and shoot.” There’s not a lot of guesswork or overthinking driver inputs.

After a quick pit stop, it was time for a change of pace, from swift mountain carving to full-on track attack.

“Now you may be noticing a couple of differences, namely the seating position and the setting. And that’s because I’m in a right-hand version of the Vantage now on the Monteblanco Race Circuit. I know I said the Vantage was built for the streets first and foremost, but that doesn’t mean it’s not track capable. This just goes to show that.

Everything, it starts with that ferocity of the V8, it sounds sweet and it means business; but then tethered to the suspension and everything else, this thing is incredibly, incredibly refined. Very tuned in.

All right, here we go. Front stretch. Let’s drop the hammer.

Come on, come on… 250, 250—250! Holy–“

So yeah, the Vantage is undeniably fast in a straight line, that being 250 kilometers per hour, I should clarify; but, mirroring the list of changes discussed earlier, the vehicle is equally impressive in the corners.

Setting up after the high-speed front stretch, the optional carbon ceramic brakes bring the speedometer down with haste. Maintaining a good bite on the tarmac was a set of AML-coded Michelin Pilot Sport S 5 rubber, 275’s upfront and meaty 325’s in the rear.

Two more performance goodies include an electronic rear differential and an adjustable traction control system. An all-new Vantage feature, the adjustable traction control system allows the driver to manually set the amount of wheelspin. There’s a lot of technical jargon I could use, but the key take away is….

Yes, you can drift it.

The 2025 Vantage retains that iconic design that so many people love with some adjustments, starting up front with that wide-open grille, now 38% larger and increasing mass airflow by 29%, bookended by new LED headlights. 21-inch wheels are standard, accenting the recognizable side profile. The rear end is built with a wider bumper and larger quad-tip exhaust, but again keeps the Vantage vibes.

The cockpit is simultaneously lavish thanks to the high-quality materials and expert fitment, yet sports-car purposeful with a sense of simplicity derived from the blend of analog and digital controls. Certain drivers’ functions, like the traction control and the exhaust, are tethered to physical buttons. General infotainment and instrumentation is left up to the pixels. The center screen is of particular note, utilizing Aston Martin’s in-house infotainment system, first debuted on the DB12 and integrated well here.

And on that note, the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage will start around $191,000. And if you’re one of the lucky few with the Vantage on their shopping list, you’ll be pleased to hear that production at Aston Martin’s Gaydon plant has already begun, with the first examples arriving during the second quarter of 2024.

There has been a lot of great news coming from Aston Martin over the last year or so, and with a subtle hint of more to come this year, we’ll have plenty more to talk about soon.

But until then… drive safe and stay tuned to MotorWeek.