Aston Martin's Matt Becker wins Autocar Awards 2021 Mundy Award for Engineering

Becker began his apprenticeship at 16, starting on the same day as Gavan Kershaw, now Lotus’s director of attributes and product integrity, and James Key, now McLaren’s F1 technical director.

At first, Becker wasn’t allowed to get too close to vehicle dynamics – engineers were meant to be 23 before they could get a permit for test driving – but he spent some time being tutored by Alistair McQueen, Lotus’s famed development driver, who realised the younger Becker had natural talent (even though he’d already binned his dad’s company Vauxhall Carlton on the way to a night out after giving it “the biggest clutch kick of my life” in an effort to get it sideways rather too effectively). “I ended up specialising as an engine technician,” says Becker. It took until he was 21, “when a job came up as a junior development engineer on the Elise”, that his job began to involve driving.

“It was basically doing a bit of everything, so I was helping develop theElise’s metal matrix composite brakes, the heating and ventilation system, headlights, anything,” says Becker. “They still wouldn’t let me too close to the dynamics, then eventually they said ‘Do you want to do some tyre development on the 111S?’ when we went to a 225 rear tyre with Pirelli. I thought ‘Finally!’, and that was the entrance to it.”

The Series 2 Elise followed (“a much bigger change on the dynamics than people realised”) alongside myriad versions of the Elise and Exige platform, including the 340R and the 2-Eleven, plus confidential Lotus Engineering cars for other car makers. Then came an all-new Lotus.

“Around 2007, the company wanted to do the Evora,” says Becker. “The Elise Series 2 was a development of a car that existed, but the Evora was a completely clean sheet of paper and my opportunity as a development lead to basically work with the design and analysis teams and say ‘This is what I want this car to achieve’.”

The Evora was a longer-legged GT car. “I’d spent so much time in Elises and knew how tiresome they became over long distances,” says Becker. “I wanted to create a car that was as agile as the Elise but a lot more comfortable, a lot more forgiving.” It won Autocar’s Britain’s Best Driver’s Car contest in 2009, but Becker will also admit that Lotus “made cars for engineers” rather than customers and that “you’d have to liquidise passengers before they’d fit in the back” of an Evora. On top of all that, the Evora’s generous steering lock, so useful for sliding the car around, meant the wider wheel wells badly offset the pedals.

“Towards the end of my time at Lotus, in 2014, I was thinking ‘Well I’ve done Evora, what’s next?’, and Geely [Lotus’s current owners] weren’t around,” says Becker. He talked to a few different people, including Aston Martin, just when Andy Palmer, who had previously tried to headhunt him, was appointed Aston’s boss. “I thought there’s some kind of fate here,” says Becker.

“Andy told me what the cycle plan was at Aston. I didn’t think there’s anywhere else I could go that would give me such an opportunity to apply some of my knowledge and learn new things, unless you go to Porsche or Lamborghini, not even McLaren. You’re not going to have that portfolio of experience, so I took a leap of faith.”

What followed was “the biggest culture shock of my career”, he says. On his first day, Becker was handed six or seven printed sheets of acronyms and their explanations, a “Ford-speak” hangover of the company’s time as part of Ford’s Premier Automotive Group, that he’s since either helped to drive out or “just got to know them”.

He started when the DB11 project was already pretty well advanced, but he was able to have a bigger hand in the Vantage and is particularly fond of the DBS Superleggera. The DBX, however, a four-and-a-half-year project, is very much a car Becker oversaw from the start. “We had to do tons of benchmarking,” he says.

“We needed to understand these products and measure them to death to get the characteristics we wanted.” Pick a rival SUV and, by and large, you’ll find it comes from a member of a big manufacturer group, with both the opportunities of scale and the drawbacks of having to fit into a niche that such an association entails. “We could say: ‘X car feels like that because of this number or that number,’” Becker explains. “But basically we generated what we wanted DBX to be because we’ve got the freedom; it gave us the chance to make something we wanted in terms of package for the car but also in terms of dynamics for the car. We were like ‘Yeah, these guys have done this’ because that’s the bandwidth they’ve got to work in. We didn’t have to do that.”

The result is a car that was launched just as Palmer was ousted and new boss Tobias Moers was installed by new investors. “He’s one of the most technical CEOs I’ve worked with,” says Becker. “So much so that when I first met him, we were discussing bush differences on AMGs and he knew the different rates – axial, radial and torsional – on all of the different suspension bushes on the car.” British roads (and, you suspect, Becker) have persuaded Moers that sportiness doesn’t have to come at the expense of isolation. “Tobias knows comfort is important certainly to Aston customers,” says Becker. “They don’t want a GT car that isn’t comfortable, so he gets that.” Moers arrived just in time to adopt a vehicle that has the best ride and handling blend in the class in the form of the DBX, and in Becker he has one of the world’s most eminent vehicle engineers.