The Grand Tour

The Grand Tour Aston Martin Vulcan Review: What Jeremy Clarkson Did and Didn’t Tell You

As if the first episode of The Grand Tour was not enough, it just got even better with a jaw-dropping beast of a car – the Aston Martin Vulcan hypercar. Jeremy Clarkson gets behind the wheel of this track-only monster (the vein of the Ferrari FXX K and the McLaren P1 GTR) and although he tries his best to tell us about the car, there’s only so much the show can give us.

With that being said, we wanted to take a more in-depth look at the Vulcan and understand how it made Jezza feel like he was locked in a room with a bear who’s ready to attack!

Just to briefly elaborate on the bear, Jeremy describes the feeling of being behind the wheel:

“Not going to say it’s like being attacked by a bear, it isn’t, but it is like being in a room with a bear that is thinking of attacking you.”

Coming it at a price-tag of £1.8million that delivers a whopping 800 horsepower from its insane 7.0-litre V12 engine (to put it in context, that’s more than a Le Mans LMP1 car), the mighty Vulcan seems to have shaken Clarkson to the core in the first few laps around Eboladrome.

Top speed you say? Glad you asked. Well the Vulcan can hit speeds of 224mph (360kph) which quite frankly, is mind-blowingly fast. The Vulcan can reach 0-60mph in less than 2.9 seconds.

The interior of the Vulcan is almost as impressive as the exterior with a light-as-a-feather roll cage coming in a 32kg, carbon fibre racing seats and 6-point racing harness to lock the pilot, er, driver in.

I was lucky enough to chat with the owner of a Vulcan, which turned out to be the same owner who let The Grand Tour borrow it for a test and he agreed to let me have a seat in the car. When I got in, I was welcomed by an F1-style steering wheel that even had a pit lane limiter button and my dreams of flying a jet fighter were almost coming true.

If my heart was racing just being sat inside, I wouldn’t like to think how I would cope if we got it moving!

Don’t let the hefty price put you off, as all 24 of these comes with a squadron of mechanics to keep this incredible piece of machinery in tip-top condition. The only thing that is missing (as Jeremy came to finding out after completing the test), is the lack of a handbrake.

Clarkson describes the Vulcan beautifully:

“What I love most of all, it’s not a test bed or what cars will be like in the future, it’s a celebration of what they were like in the past. What it is, is old time rock and roll”.

The main question though, how fast can it get around the Eboladrome track… Well, it couldn’t get any higher on the leaderboard if it tried.

So a conclusion then – Whatever angle you look at it, the Vulcan is most certainly a head turner, and is most certainly the ultimate track-day weapon.

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