cars news 10: Driver’s Seat: Meet The Man Making Aston Martins Handle

Until December 2014, Matt Becker had worked, man and boy, at the tiny British sports car maker Lotus. He started as an apprentice at just 16 and made his way through various departments at the company, including a three-year stint in the dyno room, before becoming a junior engineer on the Elise Series 1 in 1995, and then from 2000 heading all Lotus chassis development.

It was a family thing. Matt’s father, Roger, retired as Lotus’ director of vehicle engineering in 2010 after a 43-year career. “I basically grew up around cars,” Becker says, “and I ended up doing the job my father retired from.”

Becker joined Aston Martin on January 5, 2015. And, yes, after all those years at Lotus, there was some culture shock to deal with. “The biggest was the number of acronyms,” he laughs, “because there’s a lot of Ford-speak in the company from when Aston Martin was part of the Premier Automotive Group.” The newbies’ manual at Aston’s headquarters apparently includes seven pages of acronyms commonly used in the company. “I still don’t understand half of them,” Becker confesses.

It’s been decades since Lotus built a front-engine car, and Aston doesn’t currently have a mid-engine car in its lineup, but there were other revelations for Becker, too. “At Lotus the maximum speed for most of our cars was 170, 175 mph,” he says, “while Aston has cars that do 200 mph. That’s a huge difference.” And the new DB11’s advanced electronic architecture, sourced from Daimler, offered new ways to tune the chassis. “Having the ability to adjust the steering feel and the damping within the car at all these different speed ranges is a tool that broadens its dynamic capability enormously.”

2017 Aston Martin DB11 side in motion 02

2017 Aston Martin DB11 rear three quarter

2017 Aston Martin DB11 rear three quarter in motion

2017 Aston Martin DB11 rear three quarter 04

2017 Aston Martin DB11 rear three quarter 03

Like many contemporary performance cars, the DB11 allows the driver to switch between damper and powertrain modes, and Becker reveals a dirty little secret about how automakers often use the feature. “What happens in many other companies is when drivers press the button [to change from Comfort to Sport, for example, and vice versa], the computer overshoots the ideal setting and then declines it back to where the engineers want it to be,” he says. “But the customer gets the ‘experience’ of the change; they press the button and feel ‘I’ve made the change.’ ”

“We’re not using that strategy yet,” he says as we ride together in the DB11 prototype in Italy. “Will we? I don’t know. What I don’t want to do is to have a really nice ride and then make it less and less comfortable.”

Under Becker—father and son—Lotus cars developed a reputation for remarkably good ride quality. That was, says Matt Becker, partly a function of developing cars on the bumpy and challenging roads near Lotus headquarters in Norfolk, where he still lives, commuting the 150 miles or so back home from Aston Martin every weekend. Our first experience with the DB11 suggests we’re going to feel some of that Lotus suppleness in the next generation of Aston Martins, and Becker’s quick to agree: “In the primary motion—the heave motion—you don’t need to make the car uncomfortable to make it handle. The DB11 is the start of that characteristic coming to Aston.”

Becker insists the new DB needs to be comfortable and confidence-inspiring to drive. “As we develop other models [like the next-gen Vanquish and Vantage],” he says, “maybe we’ll make them a bit edgier.” Even so, he doesn’t believe that driving a fast car fast should be all big balls, sweaty palms, and sharp intakes of breath. “You want composure, balance, linearity, connection. If you combine all that together, you give the driver the confidence to drive the car very quickly with no fuss. The car should be very intuitive to drive. That’s what we’re looking for.”

Sounds a lot like the criteria we use when evaluating our annual Best Driver’s Car….

Read about the Aston Martin Vanquish Zagato right here.

More from The Big Picture: