“It’s a ‘pinch me’ moment every time I look at it. The design is 20 years old but has aged really well”
For Jethro Harris, his Aston Martin Vantage V8 coupé is a dream come true, albeit one tinged with sadness.
“I’ve always loved the model,” he says, “but unfortunately mine was an inheritance purchase. My dad had always wanted to buy one but never quite managed to, so when the opportunity to own one eventually fell to me, I thought: ‘Okay, let’s do it.”
Jethro bought his Vantage, a regular V8 registered in 2015, 12 months ago from an independent dealer. “I’d been looking for six months and had clear requirements,” he says. “It needed to be the coupé and it needed to be a manual. I wasn’t too fussed whether it was the regular V8 or the V8 S, since in normal driving I don’t believe there’s sufficient difference between them.
“It also needed to be a 2015 model with the improved suspension but before the 2016 update, when the dashboard was upgraded. I prefer the older dash. The car I eventually bought ticks all those boxes.”
All those boxes bar one: it had had what, at first, Jethro thought was an unsettling number of previous owners. “It’s had six previous keepers but my uncle, who used to be a car dealer, assured me that cars like the Vantage are just toys that are owned for a couple of years before being sold when the owner fancies a change.
“As long as the service history is up to date, he said, I should have nothing to worry about. Fortunately, it was. Also, the car didn’t have a stupidly low mileage: 33,000 suggested it had been used, rather than parked up for long periods,” he says.
Jethro will say only that he paid “the mid-forties” (that’s thousands) for his car but he seems happy with that. He says: “Looking at the current prices for similar examples, the value of mine appears to be holding up.” With his dream of Aston Martin ownership realised, Jethro has the pleasure of admiring his V8 each time he opens his front door. “It’s a ‘pinch me’ moment every time I look at it,” he says. “The design is 20 years old but has aged really well.”
He may be the happy owner of an Aston but Jethro still watches the pennies. “I had the car serviced last month, not by a main dealer but by an excellent independent workshop in Egham called Aston Keeper,” he says. “They’re not a tick-box garage but instead do only what is required. For example, they improved the gearchange reverse to first had been a bit baulky with fresh oil and fixed the seized rear handbrake caliper pins that I suspect a previous workshop hadn’t spotted.
“The mechanic worked for ages trying to free them and eventually fitted a set of secondhand parts from stock. They also know which alternative parts to use, such as Jaguar ones, that are the same but cheaper.”
Jethro says that, on a limited-mileage policy, the Vantage is cheaper to insure than his 2018 Alfa Romeo Giulia 2.0 Veloce. “That was a relief,” he says.
“I park it outside too, so I should be worried about it being stolen except that I’m banking on a Vantage being harder to dispose of than cars such as Mercedes.” Let’s hope he’s right.
