British guns, Italian roses

By DAN NEIL

July 18, 2008 12 AM PT

The Aston Martin V8 Vantage and the Maserati GranTurismo S are beautiful, irrelevant cars -- an evenly matched set of luxury-performance cuff links.

The brief on them both for 2009 is simple: more horsepower. The V8 Vantage gets a bigger engine (4.7 liters vs. 4.3 liters) and an 11% bump in overall bluster, to 420 hp. The GranTurismo S, the performance variant of the company’s grand touring coupe, is fitted with a 4.7-liter, 440-hp version of the Ferrari-built V-8. Both are front-engine, rear-drive coupes with automated six-speed gearboxes. Both travel in excess of 180 mph and cost around $130,000.

It’s amazing that they feel so different.

The car from Warwickshire is masculine and none-too-mannered, a royal reprobate. The car from Modena, broad shouldered and curvy, seems vaguely he-she, a machine hermaphrodite. One is English, a cold glass of British gin set on fire and pitched through the window of respectable people’s houses. The other is Italian, a lyric of lust and privilege played on purloined lyre.

But first, a word from the zeitgeist: These are good times for super-luxury sports cars. Why? Because as the global economy pounds itself to the flatness Thomas Friedman describes, vast amounts of wealth are being generated in the emerging plutocracies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. In 2007, for example, India minted 23,000 new millionaires and China 70,000, according to Merrill Lynch’s most recent report on world wealth. Aston Martin, Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati are planting dealerships in places like Moscow, Beijing and Shanghai as fast as the concrete will dry. After all, callow young men with ridiculously large watches must be served.

Things aren’t nearly so boom-boom here in the States, and yet six-figure sports car sales remain robust, for obvious reasons. Think about it. Whatever a luxury sports car is supposed to signify -- exclusion, privilege, wealth, power -- is magnified in hard times. If you savor the teeth-gnashing envy of those less fortunate, an audacious touring car like the Mazzer or the Aston will have them falling over in the bread lines. If you wanted to twist the knife in all those whinnying greeniks, you could find no more stylish a blade than these.

Of the two, the Maserati is the greater outrage. Nearly five meters (192 inches) of sinister elegance, this is the most beautiful Maserati of the modern era. The S edition comes with a number of aero and cosmetic mods, including 20-inch wheels, flashier side sills and a more pronounced trunk-lid spoiler. Exotic-car ornithologists can also look for the GT-S’ distinctive red mono-bloc calipers inside the front wheels.

That all sounds so clinical. The fact is, the sight of this car makes your heart go thump like digitalis with a whiskey chaser.

In the hill country of Emilia-Romagna, the Mazzer feels like what it is -- a big, powerful car, more fullback than wide receiver, a car that rejoices in long high-speed runs but tends to feel increasingly cramped and frustrated as the corners tighten. Actually, in relative terms, it’s not even that fast. The Porsche 911 is quicker and cheaper; on a road course, a cheapie BMW 135i will smoke the Mazzer like a good Havana.

The GT-S is a grand touring car like Steinways are grand pianos: big, summary, self-defined. The larger-displacement engine pours out torque like maple syrup from a fire hose. It’s not a raw kind of thrust; there’s always a sense of unstrained reserve. The car’s up-rated sports seats are perfect, the onboard electronics excellent and the cabin -- with the pleasant reek of corporate-cousin Ferrari everywhere -- sweetened with refinement.

The one hint of the family’s famous temper is the car’s exhaust bypass switch. Press the “sport” button and pneumatic valves close off the mufflers, giving the car, essentially, a straight-pipe exhaust. This has the same aural effect as throwing a couple of rabid bobcats in the trunk. Bombing into a corner, downshifting like mad, the growling, snarling, feral overruns will make you misty.

The V8 Vantage is an interesting case. Like its presumed nemesis, the Porsche 911, the V8 Vantage is a slowly evolving creature -- which itself suggests a degree of confidence, even self-satisfaction. The exterior is virtually unchanged since its debut in 2005. The interior gets a slight freshening with a new center-stack console (unfortunately, the multifunction controller is all but unreachable behind the standard six-speed gearshift).

Out on the road, however, the Aston feels more committed to the cause of adrenaline.

This bored-and-stroked version of the Ford-block V-8 is more eager and elastic, responsive, more there. Overall torque is up 15%, to 347 pound-feet. Buttoned to the now-smarter and quicker automated paddle-shifter -- the best $4,000 you can spend on this car -- the Aston feels coltish and edgy when pushed, but surprisingly sedate at low speed. Aston’s engineers have managed to tame the car’s low-speed driveline snatch, which is that jerking behavior when the car is puttering along in traffic.

If the Aston is a fencing foil to the Mazzer’s saber, no wonder. The British car is 20 inches shorter (172.5 inches) and a whopping 541 pounds lighter.

These days, the U.S. car market seems like a late-night rave at which someone suddenly cut the music and turned on all the lights, leaving revelers blinking and baffled. But as these cars show, in other places in the world, the party goes on.

dan.neil@latimes.com

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Two for the road

2009 Aston Martin V-8 Vantage Coupe with Sportshift

Base price: $123,500

Price as tested: $132,000 (est.)

Powertrain: 4.7-liter, 32-valve DOHC V-8 with variable valve timing; six-speed automated manual gearbox; rear-wheel drive

Horsepower: 420 at 7,000 rpm

Torque: 347 pound-feet at 5,750 rpm

Curb weight: 3,595 pounds

0-60 mph: 4.7 seconds

Top speed: 180 mph