Aston’s Oxymoron

AMG’s eight is a brawny, raucous cad of a motor

FIRST DRIVE Aston Martin DBX

MOMENT OF CLARITY NUMBER ONE: if you were asked to create a luxury SUV that drove with the alacrity the Aston Martin name demands, you might seek to pull together a team and a parts tool-kit 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 exotic Silverstone to host our first meeting with the car in finished, production-ready guise. Aston have 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