Safety fast: driving Aston's other F1 car

Mayländer’s three laps are a breathtaking display of on-limit control, interspersed with savage acceleration and ferocious braking.

Commitment like this is essential when there are 20 F1 cars looming in his rear-view mirror, he says: “Especially when there’s debris on the track, the drivers don’t always know and maybe get frustrated because I’m holding them back. I try not to, but safety comes first.”

Back at the garage, he describes how, on race day, he and long-serving co-driver, Richard Darker, will have been strapped into their Vantage at the pit exit with the engine running for at least 10 minutes before the start.

“You feel the tension,” he says. Among recent races, the Australian Grand Prix stands out. “The rain was extreme and we had a few deployments and did 13 laps in total.

In such conditions, you need a communicative car like the Vantage that lets you know where the track is drying out, which we report to the race director.”

Meanwhile, poised at the back of the grid ready to deploy during the race’s critical opening lap, is the F1 medical car. It’s here at Stowe today – an Aston Martin DBX 707, one of two that have been in service since 2023.

It replaced the original DBX safety car and, being a 707, has a 696bhp, 4.0-litre twin-turbo engine capable of catapulting the 2300kg SUV from zero to 62mph in 3.1sec. Fire extinguishers, medical bags and a defibrillator have their own dedicated storage compartments in the back, while the comms kit is packed in the spare-wheel well.

Throughout the race, the on-board medic has access to communications from Race Control and can see not only the FIA marshalling system but also biometric data from the race drivers and live television images enabling early assessment of an incident.

Official medical car driver Karl Reindler is a former professional racer who is covering 14 F1 races this season. “The job is more than just about driving a car fast,” he says. “You must also keep a cool head and have good situational awareness.”

Especially so, he adds, when F1 cars can almost do two laps of a circuit in the time it takes the DBX – and the Vantage – to do one. Fortunately, the car is fast enough to complete the opening lap and park up ready to deploy before the race pack bears down.

“On a deployment, we have to think fast and weigh up our priorities,” says Reindler. “For example, at the start of the F2 support race of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix last year, there was a three-car pile-up that required me and my medic co-driver to decide who to prioritise.