Aston One-77: on track

Somewhere in Aston Martin's Gaydon headquarters, a small dedicated team is hard at work turning the new One-77 from dream to reality. They took it for a little spin. It did 220mph. Now meet the man who nailed it and watch the car on its first proper test...

Words: Bill Thomas
Photography: Joe Windsor-Williams

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Chris Porritt doesn't look like a world Grand Master test driver and automotive engineer. How do I put this? Er, he looks a bit, well, geekish.

I will immediately back-pedal on that statement by saying that Porritt looks pretty tough for a geek - if there were a World Geek Cage Fighting Championship then you'd expect Porritt to be winning it.

He is not a particularly skinny bloke, and he gives you the impression he doesn't suffer fools or take crap from anyone generally. But it's interesting that a bespectacled and relatively softly-spoken English chap, who looks a bit like a ‘Brains' character you might find plumbing the depths of a Dell motherboard, or Harry Potter on a less confident day, has a job that takes him about as far away from geekdom as it's possible to be - Porritt is Chief Platform Manager for the Aston Martin One-77.

Watch the One-77 in testing

Thinking about it, if we're talking ultra-cool, non-geek occupations, on a world scale it probably runs Rock Star, Fighter Pilot, Chief Platform Manager for Aston Martin One-77, not necessarily in that order.

The One-77, in other words, is Porritt’s baby – this £1,200,000, 750bhp supercar that will (must!) represent the pinnacle of Aston’s automotive achievement, ever, is his to get right or wrong. Happily, then, he is precisely that world Grand Master test and racing driver and engineer, working with a team of equally gifted grand masters at Aston Martin, tasked with creating the ultimate supercar, money (nearly) no object. There were seven heads on the One-77 team at the start, back in October 2007. Now there are 30, working to a very strict timetable, driven relentlessly by Aston’s mercurial boss, Dr Ulrich Bez.

Watch the One-77 in testing

The first car of 77 rolls off the production line later this year, and the sort of customers who have bought it - there are 48 orders fully paid-up already - won't want to be waiting any longer than expected for their new toy. The car's development cycle is now 80 per cent complete. We're here to find out a bit more about the grubby hard work that goes on between the initial unveil of the concept and the first finished car rolling off the production line.

We meet Porritt at Aston's Gaydon factory on a freezing January day. He arrives in surely the most spectacular-looking supercar in creation, one that matches fabulous looks with a stupendous high-pitched V12 scream. Porritt has just returned from the Nardo test track in the heel of Italy, a big banked circle 7.8 miles in circumference, where cars can easily get to their terminal velocity, and stay there.

Watch the One-77 in testing

The One-77 in these pics, built last July and one of four mules running around in various parts of the world, was always going to travel the fastest because it’s the engine and transmission calibration car. It has done 1,800 miles, and exists primarily to make sure the big Aston's 7.3-litre normally aspirated V12 engine, co-developed with Cosworth, works as it should in all conditions.

Mule KX09 LHR started life doing a lot of time-consuming work at low speed. Dull to the layman, but interesting for Porritt. Shunting to and fro in car parks, making sure the engine starts properly and returns to idle, making sure the new six-speed paddle-shift transmission works as it should, and also spending a lot of time on the dyno. All went to plan, then its first proper test happened at Nardo in December, where it achieved a maximum of 220.007mph.

Watch the One-77 in testing

I ask Porritt what that was like. "Remarkably boring," he says, then laughs. "I don't mean it was boring to drive the car! But in terms of the test, everything went to plan. Nardo took place to prove that all our simulation, empirical knowledge and downright guessing - ‘engineering judgement', let's call it! - was correct.  Things like the cooling - engine oil cooler and radiator, thermal management stuff in the engine bay, engine calibration at very high engine speeds. It was all pretty much as predicted - and that's largely down to having clever people involved early in the project, in the initial spec and the initial thought."

Watch the One-77 in testing

There are 225 sensors on this car, most of them thermo-couples measuring - you guessed it - heat. In the exhaust, at the exit of the engine and into the manifold, then all the way into the catalytic converters, out of them, then down the rest of the pipe. There are more measuring oil temperature in the transmission, both into and out of it, on either side of the cooler and on all of the water coolers and within the aircon system and cabin. There are 25 sensors on the body structure alone, more on the suspension and chassis, and still more on heat shields in critical places, where sensors are required on either side of a shield to make sure it's doing its job.

Watch the One-77 in testing

Peer into the car's cockpit and - unsurprisingly given the number of sensors elsewhere - it's full of wires. Two computers are dumped in the passenger footwell, measuring air-fuel ratio for each bank of cylinders, wires spewing forth in all directions. And the car's interior and bodywork is rough and ready, with bits of trim missing and no nod to aesthetics or comfort anywhere. The doors close with a hollow ‘thwank'. There is no handbrake. It is a pure mule, but all the more beautiful and wonderful for it. I ask Porritt what will happen to it eventually.

"Crushed," he says with a grin. 

Watch the One-77 in testing

The One-77 has a myriad of highly creative engineering touches. Engine air travels from the air filter box to each side of the engine through the carbon-fibre chassis, inside an upper member of the front body structure. And Porritt draws me a diagram to show how air for cooling the alternator, aircon and brakes, passes through three separate channels within the chassis. And those evil-looking intakes on either side of the nose aren't just for show - they feed the engine its air, and have the further effect of stabilising air running down the side of the car. And that's just one aspect of the aero model, which runs right back to the deployable rear wing and the shuttering on the rear radiators. And we haven't even mentioned the car's double-wishbone suspension and how that works with the carbon-ceramic brakes and everything else. ‘Complex' doesn't really cover it.

"I've been very fortunate to have greater freedom to be able to spend money to make sure things are right," says Porritt. "And the people on this project have great enthusiasm. There is a requirement to deliver the car to a time scale, which can be very stressful, but everyone knows they'll only have one chance to do a car like this."

Meeting Porritt and seeing the great Aston in this workmanlike state really hammers home exactly what the few lucky One-77 customers are paying for - brain power. It isn't a cheap car, but it was never going to be. It's simply brilliant, packed full of innovative thinking from some of the best engineers and designers anywhere. As Porritt disappears with a neat flick turn and the V12 screams to full revs as he deliberately spins the wheels on the slippery tarmac, all thoughts of ‘geekiness' waft away on the cold Warwickshire wind. What a car.