Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: £116,908 to £125,717
Fabulous looks, landmark cabin design and quality, great sound, potent performance, precise and interactive handling, inspired paddleshift transmission.
Awkward ignition switch, on the thirsty side.
A true rival to a Ferrari or a Porsche.
Five stars again. The DB9 feels tight, sporty, friendly and understandable within 50 yards of driving off, its eagerness not sullied by a dark temperament. The driving position is multi-adjustable, the view out is surprisingly good and all the controls are ideally weighted with good feel and a progressive action. This is especially true of the steering, which is quick and precise, with no lost motion or rubberiness, and transmits a believable, constantly changing picture of the road surface. You can feel exactly what you're doing in this car. There's huge grip, which when breached can let the nose run wide in tight corners unless you pitch in to let the tail take the upper hand. On fast bends it's stable and responsive, always confidence-inspiring. It rides very well, too, despite the lack of clever adaptive dampers. It's just good, conventional chassis engineering honed to a high peak.
A factory-fitted Sport Pack is available for £2,500, involving firmer, lower suspension and different alloy wheels - the same size but lighter by more than 1kg each. This reduction in unsprung mass allows the suspension to react more quickly to bumps and cornering forces. The pack also involves the composite undertray being replaced by a load-bearing aluminium panel that improves stiffness, while still managing underbody airflow. The result is an even more focused driving experience, with better high-speed body control and steering response: it feels more agile and more involving. And although the ride is firmer, it's still entirely in keeping with the character of the car: sporting, but happy to cruise too.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the six-speed automatic was a very well sorted robotised manual of the Ferrari F1 variety. Dashboard buttons select Park, Neutral, Reverse or Drive; with D selected, you can either leave the 'box to its own devices or go manual with the paddles. The upshifts are quick, definite and very smooth, and unlike with a robotised manual they are best triggered without lifting the accelerator. Downshifts have the usual automatic rev-blip, which happens a tiny bit later than it would with an F1-type shift. And the automatic mode is ultra-smooth.
But don't overlook the six-speed manual gearbox, which feels bulletproof, offering quick and precise changes through the well spaced ratios. The clutch is heavy, but then it needs to be with an engine this powerful to deal with. Occasionally it's a little reluctant to engage first, but you soon learn the knack.
You couldn't reasonably ask for more pace than the 186mph and 4.9-second 0-60mph time that even the automatic offers. Go for the manual, which weighs less, and that time is down to 4.7 seconds. There's no valve timing or variable inlet manifolding trickery here, but the engine delivers a broad spread of potent pulling power right up to 6500rpm.
Carefully tuned intake and exhaust lengths give the DB9 a fabulously racy sound when revved and worked hard, with a few deliberate disharmonies to make the note more powerful and more guttural. A valve closes off the loud part of the exhaust at low speeds and light loads in order not to startle urban pedestrians. The idle is surprisingly busy-sounding, but that adds to the notion of well-oiled machinery with huge power potential.
The gear ratios are a good compromise between easy cruising and instant acceleration, but such is the torque spread that you can easily burble past slow traffic without much of a downshift.
