Who’d have thought a Netflix show could help drive the sale of supercars. And yet that appears to be the case, as Aston Martin enjoys the benefits of Formula 1’s current boom on the back of Drive to Survive and other measures that have made the sport more popular than ever before.
Speaking at the reveal of the new V12-powered Vanquish, Aston Martin Australia boss Nathan Lowe, revealed the impact the brand’s entrance into F1 has had. Lowe told Torquecafe that Aston Martin sees a spike in website traffic around every race weekend that Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll hit the track in their green machines.
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“ Yeah, we see a huge increase in the people going to our website to configure cars when F1 races are on,” Lowe said.
And it helps that at many of the races Aston Martin provides the safety car and medical cars (although that role is shared with Mercedes-AMG), so there is a direct showroom connection.
“Obviously Vantage and DBX707 are the safety and pace cars,” Lowe said. “We see a direct influence of that into our configurator. But as much as the car we’re looking at here today [the Vanquish] is Aston Martin Racing Green, that’s now our most popular colour. So that’s filtered straight through from F1 as well.”
But there’s a deeper connection than just fans playing around on the configurator or a new favourite colour. Aston Martin is forging deep technical links between the F1 team and its road car business to ensure that going racing improves what it offers to customers. There are already elements of that with the more powerful new Vantage (reportedly influenced by F1 drivers calling for it to have more power to better pace the field), the new Vanquish flagship and the all-new mid-engine range of supercars – Valkyrie and Valhalla.
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“The obvious stuff’s still there, the tech on this car [Vanquish],” he said. “The louvres, that’s a direct inspiration from our F1 car. The diffuser, they will use [F1] technology. And, I guess the truest form of that is stuff like Valhalla and Valkyrie, where you’re taking direct F1 technology and putting it into a road car.”
The interest is reflected in Aston Martin’s sales growth. In 2018 the British brand managed just 13 sales in Australia and just 48 in 2020, but since returning to F1 in 2021 sales have grown steadily and hit 154 units in 2024.
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