I just took my Aston on a 2000 mile road trip down east coast of U.S. Thought I would share my experiences from the perspective of a typical owner who doesn't know too much about cars. I learned a lot on this forum and maybe it would be helpful for newbies thinking about getting their first Aston/exotic. Pictures included of course per forum rules.

My car is a 2009 V8V roadster with SportShift (ASM1) now just under 15,000 miles. I use it as a weekend fun car, have not tracked it yet. My goal is to do roughly 4000 miles a year. For this year, I decided to take it on a 5 day trip from NY all the way down to Asheville, NC and back. I drove through most of the blue ridge parkway/skyline drive from NC to VA and also did the famous Dragon's tail/Cherohala loop.

Overall, the car did really well. Mechanically, did not run into any problems on the trip. I feel like the car really did make the journey special rather than the destination. I just wanted to keep driving. It was comfortable enough the whole way for my 6 months pregnant wife. On the twisty empty mountain roads, I finally can appreciate what the car can do. It felt incredibly stable and predictable for a novice driver. It's easy to get carried away going into corners a bit too fast and let traction control keep me in check. I have to remind myself not to get too comfortable and accidentally fall off the cliff or land in jail for going too fast. Just put on new Michelin pilot super sport on the rear and the traction is amazing dry or wet. I tried a rolling hard acceleration in 1st gear with traction control off, was surprised the rear did not break free.

Brakes felt confident the whole way through hours of twisty mountain roads. I have stock pads on the front and Porterfield on the rear. Never any signs of fading. I agree the car does not feel scary fast, but I can't see where one can use a faster car on the street especially in a large metropolitan area. In just a few seconds, it's doing go to jail speed.

It took me a long time to learn the Sportshift transmission, but I think I understand it now. It starts to make sense going 30 mph or higher and gets better the more aggressive/faster you drive. First to second gear change is difficult, the RPM has to drop by almost 2000, it's slow and awkward. Stop and go traffic totally kills the transmission, especially stopped on a hill. A few of these hill starts and you will start to smell the burn, and yes, I do clutch learn every time. Maybe I would be happier with a good automatic transmission like the F-type, but I've never tried it. When the convertible top is up, there's a rather large blind spot. But your top should not be up...

We didn't attract too much attention on the road which was nice. Ran into 5-10 people commenting on the car throughout the trip, all of them were positive. Lots of happy memories with pictures to prove, looking forward to lots of happy miles in the future.

 

nice writeup! Good job.

 

Nice ... We made the run from DC to Miami via Asheville ... Its a great drive ...