Aston Martin had a decent Las Vegas Grand Prix, finishing the race with both Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll up in the points-paying positions. Lance even managed to improve his positions from 19th at the start to 5th when the checkered flag fell. Maybe the drivers got a little extra experience and data from a trio of car folks driving the new Aston DBX 707 right after qualifying on Saturday morning. Surely friend-of-the-site Matt Farah gave Stroll a few pointers to find that speed for the race, right?
Joking aside, Farah being one of just three non-FIA-rated drivers to see the course from behind the wheel at speed is pretty dang cool. Even if the 697-horsepower SUV isn’t seeing the kinds of speeds that the F1 cars were doing, it’s mightily impressive. The car ran up to 173 miles per hour on the strip straight, while the F1 teams were seeing around 219 with a tow.
This is probably the car guy equivalent of seven minutes in heaven. Matt got to foot the car around a brand new F1 circuit for just shy of eleven minutes of driving. Admittedly you can’t learn a whole lot about a car in eleven minutes, but you can learn that it’s fast, and that’s the point of this exercise.
I’m not usually one for big and fast SUVs, but I’ll admit that the DBX 707 looks pretty damn good under the lights of Las Vegas in this shiny purple/blue paintjob. I’m sure I would never pay the $370,000 that Matt says this car would cost to build, but I’d have a hard time turning down an opportunity to give it a run around an F1 street circuit in the middle of the night. That’s the stuff dreams are made of.