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.
