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This is coach-building bought back to life: at the same event where Aston Martin was unveiling the DB11, British-based firm Kahn Design showed that there's life in the old DB9 dog yet with its vision of how it should look. It's called the Vengeance.
Displayed in the halls of the Geneva Motor Show, worryingly close to Aston's debut of the DB11, the Vengeance isn't just a Hannibal Lecter-inspired, one-piece alloy grille. Owner of the company, Afzal Kahn, said he designed this as the 'car I wanted to drive'. Thus, it has wider front wings, a resculpted roof and those oversized rear haunches, considerably fatter than those on the DB9. At the back are Zagato light clusters and exhausts featuring a crosshair motif.
Perhaps one of its most striking features is the alloys. Their design is based on a roulette wheel, with the centres in body colour with a diamond-cut outer section. Look really closely and you might notice two things: one, there are more spokes on the back rims compared to the front, 18 plays 16; and two, the front tyres are 225-section while the ones on the rear axle are enormous 335-section rollers. The idea here is that these (sort of) subtle differences help to visually widen the rear of the car even more.
Anything else?
With an interior that also has bespoke surface finishes, just five examples of the Vengeance have been made, two hard-tops and three convertibles. All of them use the same 5.9-litre V12 as a regular DB9, so the top speed is around 290km/h and the 0-100km/h time is 4.6 seconds.
Which brings us to price. Like the DBA Speedback GT of 2014 - the Aston DB5-alike motor coachbuilt by Yorkshireman David Brown on a Jaguar XKR chassis, which cost comfortably more than half a million euros - the Kahn Vengeance is certainly not what you'd call cheap. Prices start at £360,000 (around €466,300 on a direct conversion); more than double what the DB11 is likely to set you back. Still, Kahn maintains that the prices of hand-built sports cars are rising and that the Vengeance is 'likely to prove a sound investment'.