The AMR is the most powerful Aston Martin Vantage ever

It would be easy to be cynical about this. It’s the Aston Martin Vantage AMR, the first production car bred from the British firm’s new performance sub-brand. AMR to Aston is like AMG to Merc, remember.

And rather than give us a harder cored DB11, or an even madder Vanquish, we have yet another special edition version of the Vantage, a car that’s due for replacement very soon. It would be easy to brand it a run-out special and move on.

Except it looks as beautiful as ever. And the spec sheet reads very nicely indeed. With a choice of V8 and V12 engines, the latter producing almost 600bhp, we simply can’t be cynical.

Just 300 will be made, split between 200 V8s and 100 V12s. The former has 430bhp, the latter 595bhp, up 30bhp on the standard V12 Vantage S, putting it on par with the Vantage GT12 as the most powerful road-going Vantage yet. Each comes with the option of a manual or paddleshift gearbox.

There are numerous colour choices, each with a contrasting highlight colour. In the gallery above is the ‘AMR Halo Pack’, which gets Stirling Green with Lime Green contrasts, and some gratuitous Union Jack badges. Leading our images, though, is a white car with the AMR Aero Kit, which brings spoilers, splitters and dive planes. It’s a more tasteful racecar-inspired makeover than that GT12, we’d wager.

Each interior will be matched to the exterior colour scheme, too. AMR Coupes get leather and Alcantara trim, AMR Roadsters just leather, while you can option in lightweight carbon seats and lots of carbon trim if you wish. The option you definitely want is the V12’s optional titanium exhaust; Aston says it saves 14kg and “sounds sensational”. The standard car hardly sounds shabby…

The AMR comes with “direct influence from Aston Martin Racing’s participation in the FIA World Endurance Championship”, we’re told, a series which Aston won last year at GTE Pro level. While it’s the first production AMR, expect many more, including – most likely – that DB11 and Vanquish.

AMRs will come in two flavours. ‘Series production limited edition models’ like this Vantage AMR will be the base level, with ‘extensively modified AMR Pro models’ above them. The first of these is the track-only Vantage AMR Pro which we saw at Geneva. Orchestrated by Aston’s bespoke ‘Q’ division, you can probably get quite fanciful with these if your wallet’s fat enough.

Speaking of money, this Vantage AMR starts at £97,995. And because we’re not being cynical, we won’t point out how much Porsche 911 you can have for the same cash…