Aston Martin hires Ferrari's "key guys" to challenge 488 GTB

Mistake. Poor aston, finally stable business model with modern platform db11, amg engine connection, suv in pipeline, and throw it all away by chasing ferrari. Will not go well in crowded field with lambo and now mclaren all trying same thing. Aston should try to emulate porsche instead. Not ferrari.

 

agreed.

I can't imagine wanting to get into the mid-engined supercar game right now, so much amazing competition.

Aston needs to focus on being a great Aston, not a mediocre McLaren.

 

See, I'll offer a different view point. I think it's smart. Offer close to (doesn't have to be 100% of) Ferrari performance but focus more on sound and beauty. Because Ferraris are getting less good looking it seems with each model since the 458.

Could just work.

 

Maybe but engine will be amg turbo so sound will be issue.
How about offer stick shift?

 

Have you heard the AMG GTR engine. Sounds awesome. If Aston tuned it to be slightly more high pitched they'd have a winner.

 

British, german (except porsche) and american cars sound same to me. Deep muscle car sound. amg, vette, jaguar are all loud but not special. rumble is ok but not exotic. I like italian scream. cant be mistaken for anything else. Dont think aston will get that.

 

Aston completely gets it...

 

Ferrari are asshats, whats comming is totaly deserved. Its a fall based on hubris.. Their retailing experince is openign the door to everyday to more and more exotoic manufactuers.

Its not hard to make a mid engined car, there is no secret sauce anymore.

Aston has design and cachet.

 

It will be interesting to see what Aston makes. This car may turn out well because of the ex lotus guy in charge over there. This won't really hurt Ferrari. Things like this have been happening for years. Look at the 1960's house cleaning that resulted in that AMS car or whatever it was called. Ferrari have been giving people careers and inderectly designing other companies exotics for years from this type of nonsense.

 

Ferrrari never had serious competition before. ATS is the company youre thinking of, it folded because it wasted money on racing first, and the car was ugly.

Ferrari managed to alienate Ferruchio lamborghini and lamborghini survived the 70's 80's and 90s by being serious competition to ferrari.

Now in the 2ks when the tech to make great exotics is democratized, ferrari has alienated large swaths of its former customers and potential customers, this has opened the door, in terms of available clients for others.

Unlike lambo, Maclkren and Aston have the racing pedigree. And unlike all the others Aston also has a great back catalogue of stylish road cars and race winners.
They therfore have the cachet to take on ferrari, and have shown a design asthetic arguably better than ferraris. To me its all in the execution.

I do agree with you, whether Aston have hired people from ferrari is immaterial to ferrari. However the larger issues of the ferrari customer experience and the limited scope of their offerings to clients is material.

 

i agree with boxer that ferrari treats certain customers (you and me included) poorly. but they seem to treat others (those that buy ferrari after ferrari) well enough to always have waiting lists for their cars. upstarts like mac etc have to do better in that regard but i doubt ferrari will respond. if anything, they might be even more snobby as a result.

 

It even seems McLaren are treating their customers poorly. I've read about poor treatment of P1 owners. Not good.

 

Surprised to hear that as mac has been working me hard to become a 1st time customer while ferrari wants to throw me out of dealership