Aside from ride, the 770 Ultimate’s enhanced stiffness is most obvious during turn-in. With the regular DBS, there’s a faint call-and-response effect as you guide the steering wheel and then, after a delay, the nose starts to swing.
It’s just a whisper of hesitation but it’s there – and it isn’t in this car. What has helped in this regard is that Aston has removed a rubber damper from the steering column. Yet here again, paradoxically, steering feel and accuracy have improved. But so seemingly has the DBS’s occasional habit of sending road shocks up the rack.
Simon Newton, Aston’s head of vehicle engineering, reckons this is more to do with the revised damping, but whatever the reason, it feeds into the 770 Ultimate’s tactile and alert yet smooth and consistent manner.
Where things get clever – and where Aston has shown an uncanny level of awareness – is how this heightened control and pliancy in the chassis is blended into what the car’s almighty powertrain is doing.
What you don’t get, if the road is uneven or you ask for more torque than the 305-section rear Pirellis can cope with, is an immediate, flow-sapping rendezvous with the traction control system – or, if all the systems are off, an unexpected armful of opposite lock.
Instead, you can properly exploit the V12 while enjoying the sweetest ride and handling compromise since the excellent V8 DB11 of 2018 (the first Aston overseen by Matt Becker, son of Lotus legend Roger and now chief engineer at JLR).
There are other fine-tuning elements that were parsed into the DBS recipe during the 770 Ultimate’s 18-month gestation. The torque interruption during gearshifts is shorter yet transmission ‘double-bump’ has also been eradicated, so the car swaps cogs faster but now pulls out of T-junctions with seamless ease and none of the shunt that you sometimes get with the regular car.
Anyone familiar with the DBS couldn’t fail to notice the easier drivability this brings, just as they would better enjoy the 770 Ultimate’s more concentrated, accurate steering and iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove gait, which is just as appreciable at 20mph as at 120mph.
