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Barely have we had the reveal of the all-new Aston Martin Vantage and its racing brother, the GTE, than the British company drops a nine-minute, specially commissioned film on us about the gestation of the track-focused machine.
The video (down below) follows the Vantage GTE from initial concept to launch, showing what is required to build a full-on race car alongside the road-going version, with both cars revealed last week in London.
Dr Andy Palmer, the president and CEO of Aston Martin, said: "We decided to replace the current Vantage road car and - since it's really necessary to take race technology from the track to the road and from the road to the track - it's really important that we design both simultaneously. It's always important that you have a champion and Vantage is our champion."
The new Vantage GTE has some big racing boots to fill. The old Vantage GTE won the World Endurance Championship title for Teams, while the Aston famously won the GTE class at the Le Mans 2017 endurance race, following a titanic last-lap battle with a Corvette. Indeed, the team at Aston Martin Racing that was building the tub of the new Vantage GTE had to down tools in June to join everyone at the French circuit, which turned out to be the right move as the Aston took the chequered flag.
This video covers 18 months from the concept of the new Vantage GTE to the final racing machine that will take on the likes of Ferrari, Porsche, Ford, BMW and indeed Chevrolet and its Corvette at Le Mans 2018. So far, the Vantage GTE had a shakedown in August and has completed more than 14,000km of testing in the UK, Spain and at the Sebring circuit in the US.
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