The Best Laid Plans
I had a plan for this car. Drive it, care for it. Be meticulous, no short cuts. Keep it as stock as possible. In short, be a caretaker of the breed and hopefully pass it on to my boys to enjoy. I still hope to do the latter, but the former took a hit last month when it decided to leave pieces of a valve spring under the head cover. I was tripping in Cave Creek outside Phoenix, some 1,400 miles from home and up until this point, having a great time.
After getting it towed to the local Aston Martin dealer in Scottsdale, I waited a week for them to devote enough time to it to inform me of a broken exhaust valve spring. When something like that breaks it usually means there are probably other issues going on in the engine, so it isn’t just replace the spring and move on. The dealer offered to have the head reworked, but they were so leery of the condition of the lower half of the motor (bearings, rods) they were recommending a complete long block replacement engine from the factory in Cologne, Germany. Oh, and while the engine’s out, we should replace the clutch. All that to the tune of $49,000. Yeah, that’s not a typo.
By now you probably know I’m not talking about a regular car. This is a 2012 Aston Martin V12 Vantage. Only 1,200 were built between 2009 and 2012. It’s been a dream car of mine, and one I was finally able to purchase in January, 2013. Since then I’ve put over 53,000 miles on it and it’s performed flawlessly – until now.
At first, I gulped and accepted a new engine was probably the best route forward. But, I wasn’t comfortable with the explanations I was getting from the Aston service dept, so I started asking questions. I asked the service advisor a bunch of questions. I went online and asked for input from fellow Aston owners. And I emailed several Aston expert restorers, performance parts builders and service agents in the US, England and Canada. Naturally, I got a lot of sympathy. I got even more free advice; ideas about what I should do and how I should do it. Things like ‘replace it with an LS engine!’ Good God, man, you can’t be serious? Why do Americans always want to plug a Chevy engine into everything with four wheels? Then there was the ‘buy a replacement for a lot less money on eBay.’ Again, are you serious? I’m not buying anything that expensive and complicated sight unseen or off a random website. There was even a suggestion to rebuild the car better by doing a Frankenstein conversion with a Tesla. Again, I bought this car for a reason, and it wasn’t to make it into something else.
Thankfully, I also got a broad range of thoughts from the experts. That these Aston professionals are dedicated enough to respond to an email with nothing more connecting us than a carmaker says something about their commitment to owners of the brand. They provided real options and serious, detailed thoughts about what might be going on gained from decades of experience with these engines. It’s come down to pursuing a rebuild with an independent British auto shop in Phoenix run by Greg Nel, a dedicated perfectionist – just the kind of guy I want to get in league with. It turns out he is also a dealer for Aston aftermarket performance parts builder VelocityAP in the Okanogan/Osoyoos region of British Columbia. For starters, Greg spent a fair amount of time talking with me about what might be wrong and what could be done, and assuring me we could repair the engine and even provide some performance improvements for about half what the dealer was quoting. Now we’re getting somewhere!
I’m waiting for Greg to give me a couple of quotes for various ways forward. I want to get my car out of the dealer lot and into British Automotive Repair, where my car will be a work of enthusiasm and passion, not just another fix to be banged out to make room for the next one.
Stay tuned while I figure this out and give you the next installment in this journey that’s obviously one of the heart and not one based upon rational, common sense. If it were that, I would be following the advice of one of those crazy people I mentioned before, maybe even the guy who said, “just find a dealer who will take it in trade for a new one.”
What’s crazier, trying to preserve something that’s unique, or succumbing to a purely rational solution? There will always be two schools of thought on that. Maybe in a few months we’ll find out if my next move is a smart one.
