Aston Martin DBS Superleggera Volante 2019 first drive

You've got to give the sensational, certified five-star DBS Superleggera an even greater sense of occasion. What are your options?

Lurid orange paint helps, but you could also remove the roof, which is what Aston Martin has done to create the DBS Superleggera Volante: a 715bhp, twin-turbo V12-engined super-GT that will hit 211mph even when the canvas is hidden beneath the rear deck. They say this is the fastest series-production soft-top currently on sale, but it hardly needs to boast. Just look at it.

Up close and personal, the Volante looks every nut, bolt, contrast stitch and composite fibre its £247,000 asking price. It doesn't have any true direct rivals – not unless Ferrari does an 'Aperta' version of the 812 Superfast – and so the fact it costs roughly £50,000 less than an Aventador S Roadster and the same amount more than Bentley's new Continental GTC is neither here nor there. You do pay £23,500 extra over the DBS coupe, though, and here's why.

The entire front portion of the car – massive maw, carbonfibre clamshell bonnet and double-wishbone suspension included – is carried over, but accommodating the roof mechanism from the DB11 Volante meant relocating the front/mid-mounted engine’s sizeable particulate filters outboard and rotating the 78-litre fuel tank. 

The inconvenient knock-on effect was that the rear bodywork needed a total redesign, panel by panel, in order to retain visually the same heavy-set but perfectly proportioned musculature as the coupe. The tail now sits a fraction lower, and the gurney flap does without its secret, downforce-developing C-duct, but wearing a set of new forged 21in wheels, the car certainly looks no less attractive for it and the coupe’s character is indeed preserved.

So does the same apply to the dynamics?

Nearly. The rear spring and skyhook damper rates are increased to cope with an additional 100kg of mass (not all of it in the roof mech; the sills are reinforced and there’s also a new rear cross-brace) but the setup is tuned to mimic the coupe’s specific – and excellent – blend of handling and ride comfort.

It’s mostly there, not least because the Volante is very nearly as stiff as the coupe with the roof up, and you lose only 5% of that rigidity when you peel back the canvas. However, the extra weight robs it of those last few degrees of composure on less than perfectly surfaced roads, and in terms of all-round dexterity. There are modes for the suspension, and in their firmest setting the dampers do a very good job of keeping body control close without shattering the ride quality, but at speed that back axle is less poised than with the coupe, and more prone to a shimmy. It's marginal, but it's there.