Showdown: Aston Martin Vantage v McLaren Artura v Porsche 911 Turbo S

Which makes the £165,000 Vantage appear to be the bargain of the group – not a natural assumption to which I’d have readily leapt. It certainly doesn’t look that way. Parked together on a hillside, it looks every bit as ‘premium’ as Woking’s low slung slice of exotica sat next to it. Let alone the Porsche.

Want to learn what a car is like without driving it? An interior can reveal a great deal about its maker’s priorities. The Porsche cabin, of course, leans heavily on the bragging rights accorded by being part of the story of the most fabled, longest lasting sports car of all time. There are the five dials lined up across the dash, the iconic central tacho, the intimate driving position, and hatchback levels of all-round visibility. But while crammed with equipment, the quality and design of this cabin is not that different at all to that of a base Carrera costing less than half the price of the only Turbo S still on sale.

Compared in particular to the Vantage cabin, it feels far more mass produced, no doubt because it is. You can see what Aston was up to here too: get the cabin as far away from the Mercedes parts bin vibe it has had no choice but to go along with until now. It’s truly beautiful inside the Aston, easily the most opulent in the glossiness of its feel. Good decisions have been made about which functions can be hidden in a touchscreen and those which must retain physical control, and those controls are pleasingly chunky to operate too. There’s still some MB stuff in here, but it concerns the way things like the way the steering wheel buttons work, not how they look. But the infotainment system, while great to look at, remains only so-so to use. The 911’s equivalent is nothing like so easy on the eyes, but with the clout of VW Group purchasing power behind it, is a sight easier to operate.

But it is the McLaren that has by far the most driver-centric interior: nothing to clutter and load the steering wheel, major operations like chassis and powertrain modes, manual gearshifting and deactivating the ESC all accessible without your hands even leaving the wheel. It has a vast range of steering wheel adjustment too, allowing even very tall drivers to pull the wheel close to their chests. But some of the lesser instrument displays are hard to read at a glance while the central vertical tablet is small. Some functions it controls are easy to use, like seat heating and ventilation, but for entertainment and navigation it’s just easier (by far) to connect your telephone and use CarPlay instead.

I take the 911 first, because wherever it finishes this test, it starts as the benchmark, the one against which the others will be judged. It’s a role the car has been performing for over 60 years now and we all know how good it is at that.

The Turbo S has all of Porsche’s most trick bits, from active roll bars via ceramic brakes to four-wheel steering, and the way they combine to harness the output of the 3.75-litre flat-six is a marvel to behold. It does now what all 911 Turbos have done since the introduction of all-wheel drive and twin turbocharging with the 993 generation nearly 30 years ago: transport you across the face of the planet faster than a light aircraft.

There appears to be a clear philosophy here: if you want to go skidding about, or bursting your eardrums at 9000rpm, there are 911s that will do precisely that, just not this one. This one is for when you are here but really rather need to be there, sometime around now. Point-to-point and despite being the least powerful car here, this would be the fastest car of the lot were it not for the fact that if you actually drove any of them as fast as they can go on a public road, your final destination would more likely be a hospital bed or prison cell than anywhere more salubrious you might have in mind. It’s the narrowest of the three (but not by as much as you might think) and offers the same kind of tractive opportunity out of a sharp corner as a howitzer shell departing the barrel. The word for this car is ‘deployment’: when it comes to making the absolute most of what it has to move the car across terrain that might be twisting, bumpy and wet, the others simply cannot touch it.

And were that all there was to it we could all go home right now, but where’d be the fun in that? The more substantive issue is that while this is unquestionably the fastest non-GT 911, there’s not much doubt in my mind that it’s also the least fun. I happened to drive to the location in a Carrera T costing – wait for it – £75,000 (aka an entire 4-litre Cayman GTS) less and preferred pretty much everything about it. Its engine was sweeter and had less lag, its handling more accessible, its steering more lucid and its ride clearly superior. Did I care that I might have arrived a minute sooner in a Turbo S? No more than would you.

The Artura makes you pay a higher price for what it has to offer, and not just in the showroom. Getting in is easy enough – just aim your backside at the seat and collapse into it – but extracting yourself thereafter can be an awkward and ungainly process. It’s not even that easy to start: because it defaults to EV mode you can find yourself thinking you’ve started it but unable to explain why it won’t select a gear. You can just as easily turn it off by mistake before you’ve set off. In time you learn to listen to the little audible bong and watch the display change, but I lived with one of these for six months and still get it wrong from time to time.

But I love the driving position, snug and deep down in the car, with the goldfish bowl glasshouse around you. The unadorned wheel, the immediacy of the controls… Far more than either of the others, it makes you want to drive.

When you do, and despite their statistical on paper similarities, the contrast between the way the McLaren gets up the road and the Porsche could scarcely be more stark. It is true that the hybrid system eliminates the turbo lag so notable in McLaren’s V8 powertrain, and that by little more than 2000rpm it’s pulling hard with excellent throttle response too. But it doesn’t cannon you down the road like the 911 does when it comes on boost. The McLaren’s process is far more drawn out and it’s only when you have 5000rpm or more on the clock that it shows you what it can really do which, with a little more power and quite a lot less weight, is to make the fastest accelerating 911 in history look a little slow. It feels far more like a competition engine, its best work still done far up towards the vaulted ceiling of all it can do. In a McLaren I have no problem with that.

And we’ve still not got to the good bit yet. There’s a reason the Artura is mid-engined, has a super-stiff carbon tub, is almost alone in retaining hydraulically assisted steering and has so great an obsession for lightweighting that even with its battery pack, electric motor and all the plumbing required to integrate the hybrid drive into the powertrain, it’s still 142kg lighter than the Porsche and almost quarter of a tonne less hefty than the Vantage. It’s simply better to drive that way.

If all you’re after with such cars is the purest driving experience, read no further. The McLaren has the best turn in, the purest feel through steering and chassis, and the most poise. Right on the limit and as the only McLaren with a proper electronically controlled limited-slip differential, it’s the one I’d be most happy to skid about too.

So do we even need to bother with the Aston, the least powerful and substantially the heaviest car here? You bet we do. What follows are several hundred words on what it’s like to drive, but if you’re short of time, bored with my writing or simply want to cut out the middle man, just take a look at it. That’s how it drives.

Too often in the past Aston Martins have failed to deliver on the promise of their appearance; not this one. The powertrain may be AMG’s but it’s doubtful any has better suited the purpose of the Aston Martin to which it is fitted. Unlike the Porsche engine, it barely feels turbocharged at all, but more like a vast naturally aspirated unit with almost zero lag and near instantaneous throttle response.

And when it lets rip, oh my goodness. Forget its apparently rather tardy 0-62mph time – if 3.5sec can be so described – that says everything about the traction limitations of having the engine at the other end of the car to the driven wheels and nothing about available shove. Give it the chance and on a dry straight road it’ll break the traction of its newly developed, bespoke Michelin Pilot Sport 5S boots all the way through first, second and third. Introduce a bump or two and it’ll do it into fourth as well. I have no ready answer for why it feels so much faster in reality than it appears on paper and can report only as I find. This thing is a missile, and because it goes so hard, so soon and with such drama, it can even create the impression of offering more and not less accessible performance than its rivals, complete with a soundtrack that, with the best will in the world, the six-cylinder cars cannot touch.

There is no question, however, that in any circumstances where its speed could be used unhindered, it would be the slowest of the three from one point to the next. But does that really matter when, unless you’re on a race track, it’s an issue of purely academic interest? Not much is the answer, at least to me. You might argue – and we often have – that at this level less grip is actually a good thing. While the 911 leaves slow corners like the cork of well shaken bottle of supermarket Cava on the podium of a club meeting at Castle Combe, and the McLaren just streaks away having not had to slow much in the first place, there’s real entertainment and proper driver engagement to be had from just teasing the Aston’s back axle until it’s had all, and perhaps even a bit more than it can take. This is a car that can’t do it all by itself, one that demands that you get stuck in, and which is all the more rewarding when you do.

At higher speeds, when you just want the car to go where you’re pointing it, the Vantage is exemplary, absorbing all manner of surface and camber changes, filling you with reassurance, and using that bellowing motor to urge you ever onward. It is about as different a driving experience to that offered by the McLaren as you could imagine, but still a compelling one for very different reasons.

But there are a couple of downsides: good though its conventional auto is, the dual-clutch transmissions in the Porsche and McLaren are quantifiably better, quicker and sharper as they are. And I’d advise prospects to test drive the car on a range of surfaces: keeping that much weight so flat in the corners has required some hefty spring rates and the ride is by a distance the firmest of the three. It’s perfectly tolerable on long journeys on fast roads, but on bumpy British B-roads its jitters and jolts can become irksome, even if they rarely destabilise the car.

Which, then, to choose? Well, curious though it is to write, the Porsche is first out of the contest. For a car whose default position is to beat everything it goes up against, it seems odd to see a 911 first back into the pavilion. What’s stranger still about its early bath (if I may so mix my metaphors) is that it is the quickest point-to-point and the most logical choice of daily driver. Strong assets no doubt. But at this level we’re looking for more than pure ability: we want magic – the difference, if you like, between a fine actor and a genuine copper-bottomed film star, if I may add one more metaphor to the melange. That the 911 is relentlessly effective and impressive is, for once, not quite enough; nor is its case helped by thoughts of all those other 911s far less money will buy which may have actually fared better here, the new hybridised GTS among them.

So, McLaren or Aston? Artura or Vantage? The sheer driving brilliance of Woking, or the no less brilliant sense of theatre and occasion brought by Gaydon? The Vantage gifts easier access to all it can do and for many, perhaps even most drivers, what it can do will be more than enough to satisfy and even satiate their every automotive wish. But for the remainder, the Artura is just a better car to drive and by no small distance. It’s more comfortable than the Aston too and its hybrid offers a dimension to daily driving unavailable to Vantage drivers.

But, and while we’re on the subject, the fact the Aston is so much easier to get into and depart from is not to be dismissed. Nor is its now gorgeous interior even if it could work better than it does. It has the best engine, the most presence and is cheaper by far if such matters make a difference at this level.

Which is where others might call it an honourable draw, in recognition of the fact that both are superb examples of their art, it’s impossible to see anyone feeling shortchanged by either and despite their on paper similarities, they are in reality so different you can’t imagine anyone in real life having to choose between them. It’s tempting and there are no wrong answers here, but when we launched Ti we promised you we’d never duck a verdict and we’re not about to start now. Both are cars of which their makers should be truly proud, but it is the McLaren that carries the day. Just.

Photography by Dean Smith