11 Jun 07
For a moment, as I sat in the pit garage, strapped so tightly into the Aston I felt I should shortly depart for the moon, all was quiet. I'd waited not months but years for this moment - ever since, in fact, Aston Martin announced in 2004 it would try to win the GT category at the Le Mans 24 Hours with an all-new racing version of the DB9, the DBR9.
Doesn't sound that different does it? Just one little extra letter. How different could it be? I was about to find out.
Sitting there, it already felt pretty different. Where the road car has elegant analogue instruments, the racer has dancing diodes. There's no wood or leather clothing the cabin, just raw, woven carbon fibre. This isn't a place for comfort or recreation, it's an office, where work - in this case driving around a track as fast as possible for a day and a night - is the only consideration. Everything, and I mean every single thing, on this car, is there to make it either faster or less likely to break down. Everything else has been expunged.
Which is one reason that while a DB9 weighs 1,760kg this one weighs just 1,100kg, and would be slimmer still if the rules permitted it. And while its chassis is largely the same as that used by the DB9 (rules again), its bodywork is entirely carbon fibre. The V12 engine shares the same block and heads as the road car, and its 6.0-litre capacity too, but near enough anything that moves inside it has changed.
So you might be surprised to learn it has 'just' 600bhp, compared to the standard 450bhp of the DB9. What you may not know is those pesky rules make it breathe through an air restrictor that seriously saps power. Without it, this engine would make 800bhp with no problem at all.
