Aston Martin Singapore provided us with the keys to the new Vantage S, fine whisky and a rather nice hotel. All that was missing was a tuxedo.
For the arrival of the new Vantage S in Singapore, Aston Martin Singapore decided that a conventional launch would not quite do. Instead, a distinguished assemblage of guests were invited to spend an entire weekend immersed in the world surrounding the car, including an overnight stay at The Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Singapore accompanied by curated experiences from ELEMIS and Glenfiddich.
If the Vantage S represents a more focused interpretation of Aston Martin’s sports car, then perhaps the best way to understand it is through an equally considered experience.
The letter ‘S’ has always carried extra significance throughout Aston Martin’s history. In the case of the new Vantage S, it signifies the sharper end of the current Vantage range.
Out on Singapore’s roads, the Vantage S does not need long to remind you that there is still something wonderfully theatrical about a front-engined, rear-wheel-drive sports car. Singapore is not exactly overflowing with Alpine passes, and exploring the upper reaches of 680PS on public roads would be both irresponsible and a rather efficient way of attracting unwanted attention.
Aston Martins have always occupied an interesting corner of the sports car world. They are expected to be fast, but outright aggression has rarely been enough. There must also be elegance, occasion and enough comfort that reaching your destination does not feel like punishment for enjoying the journey, which made what happened after the drive more relevant.
Park the Vantage S and the weekend changed gears dramatically. Out went turbochargers and tyre temperatures. In came skincare.
ELEMIS was one of the partners for the Experience Vantage S weekend, giving guests a closer look at the British skincare brand and its approach to personal care.
On paper, placing high-performance skincare beside a sports car sounds like something dreamed up during an especially adventurous marketing meeting. Spend some time with both, however, and the connection becomes clearer: it is about refinement through detail.
Both concern themselves with materials, conditions and getting small details right. Different engineering departments, admittedly, but this same philosophy was also part of our previous Aston Martin experience, where ELEMIS featured alongside a deeper exploration of Aston Martin’s design process.
If ELEMIS represented precision and personal care, an intimate whisky tasting offered a different lesson in craftsmanship.
Whisky is one of those things that becomes considerably more interesting once someone knowledgeable starts explaining what you are actually tasting.
Suddenly, what was simply a glass of whisky becomes a discussion about ingredients, maturation, time and the decisions responsible for the final character. One session later, and everyone leaves with the minute knowledge of being a connoisseur.
Likewise, nobody looks at an Aston Martin and thinks about the millimetres shaved from a surface during development, the countless suspension calibrations or the debate over exactly how heavy an accelerator pedal ought to feel. You simply experience the finished product, and revel in it.
Good craftsmanship often works that way. The enormous amount of effort underneath should disappear once everything comes together. The driver shouldn’t be thinking about damper calibration while threading through a corner, just as someone enjoying a whisky shouldn’t need to picture the years it spent sitting quietly in a cask.
The work has already been done. Your job is simply to enjoy it.
And that is quintessentially the essence of the Aston Martin Experience.
An Aston has never really sold itself solely through numbers. There will always be another machine capable of accelerating harder, producing more downforce or setting a quicker lap time.
Instead, much of Aston Martin’s appeal exists in the space surrounding those figures: how the car looks when you approach it, how the cabin feels beneath your fingertips, the noise it makes when you start it and, perhaps most importantly, how it makes an otherwise ordinary journey feel rather less ordinary.
Individually, these are disparate experiences. Together, they paint a coherent picture of what Aston Martin wants ownership to represent. And apparently, sometimes it means skincare and a dram of whisky.
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