None of the modifications are what you would call major, but there’s a swarm of smaller ones. The springs are carried over from the regular DBS but the damping has been retuned for closer control. So far, so obvious, but the brilliance of the 770 Ultimate is its improved pliancy in the context of its noticeably tighter vertical body movements. All brittleness seems to have been chased from the chassis. This is appreciable not only in the way the car glides silkily along juicy B-roads in total command of its considerable mass but also in the way it cushions sudden potholes at low speeds.
Such breadth is impressive and also a bit confounding. The root of it all is the car’s increased stiffness. A new crossbrace and a thickened crossmember beneath the engine have lifted front stiffness by a quarter, while ‘increased engineering’ of a sheer panel has improved matters at the back. The benefit is that damper performance immediately improves, even before you refine and perfect the rates.
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 gets 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. No changes have been made to the mechanical limited-slip differential at the back, and it behaves as dependably as ever, but the throttle mapping and, as Newton puts it, “torque shaping” of the engine delivery have been carefully reconsidered. In gears one to four and only at below 4000rpm, the DBS now unfurls its mammoth torque in a way that avoids splurts of wheelspin when you don’t want them. This sounds contrived and even a little frustrating, but the reality is a 759bhp, 664lb ft super-GT that you can more easily bully and lay into and that still adopts slivers of oversteers with supreme ease.