And then there's the noise. “If you stick it in second and floor it,” someone advised, “it will make an incredible racket.” You don't even have to do that. Just hitting the glass button on the dash marked “Engine start” and hearing that rich, throaty roar is enough to make you feel like you're strapped into your own personal thunderbolt.
It turns a lot of heads. Too many, actually. To drive it is to be constantly stared at, pointed at, marveled over, celebrated — not something that happens a whole lot on a bike. You begin to feel a bit self-conscious. I found myself cultivating a new persona, a special air of lofty indifference, a bored, oh-what-is-all-the-fuss-about manner. It didn't fool anyone. As I jerked the Vantage back and forth in a dismal attempt to park it in a tiny space in a tiny seaside town, craning my neck to see out of the porthole that Aston Martin call a rear window, a guy stopped to give me a bit of help, and a crowd of amused onlookers gathered to watch.
“You don't seem like an Aston Martin kind of man,” said one of them when I finally parked it at an angle and got out. The nerve.
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