I must post a minor hygiene notice here too: I have not driven the DB11 on the road but only on a private, albeit vast, Bridgestone test track. The car was signed off so far as hardware is concerned, but not software and some fettling of the dampers, the torque vectoring system, the algorithms that set the parameters for Sport and Sport Plus mode for both the powertrain and chassis remain to be done. However, I have caned the engine to the limiter in every gear required to reach 160mph, and slid it around until it ran out of opposite lock.

This engine finally demonstrates how to gain more than you lose through the adoption of turbochargers. Had this been achieved by replacing a merely rather endearing normally aspirated engine, that would be impressive enough; that it has done so filling the already mighty shoes of Aston’s still splendid old V12 is nothing short of remarkable.

Indeed in its noise you suspect something blackly magic at work, some artfully crafted sound symposer or, worse, synthetic sound blasted out through the speakers, but the car has none of it. Of course, its exhausts have been tuned as they are on every new car, but the noise it makes is natural.

It is a wonderful noise: so sharp, clean, pure, characterful and very V12. True it only develops peak power at 6500rpm, but it’ll rev to 7200rpm and only lose its urge just before nudging into the soft rev-limiter, at which stage you’ll want to change up just so you can hear it howl again. And that’s what it does: as well as any V12 Aston production car there has been, it howls.

The motor is not perfect – while maximum torque is claimed to be in place at just 1500rpm, that’s not how it feels. Low down response is merely adequate for such an immensely specified engine; about 2200rpm needs to be dialled up before it all comes chiming in to boot you up the road.

However, once it is percolating, you’d need to be a powertrain engineer even to tell it’s turbocharged, let alone feel inconvenienced by the fact. It may or may not have more lag than a Ferrari 488GTB whose engine sets the forced induction benchmark, but it is detectable in neither case and therefore constructively absent. Less surprising is the gearbox: the ZF eight-speeder has for some time been the best true automatic on the market for sporting response and it has not dropped form here.

That’s just half the story, though, the DB11’s chassis is at least as good at illuminating its true character as its powertrain; and it’s not what you might expect.

When Matt Becker, former chief chassis engineer at Lotus arrived at Aston Martin 18 months ago, the development of the DB11 was just over half done. Instead of electing to stay true to Aston’s racing roots and take the car in a more sporting direction, Becker wanted to go the other way. “A DB Aston should be the ultimate GT car, which means it has to ride properly,” he explained. He started to soften the DB11’s springs and didn’t stop “until it had the lowest wheel rate of any Aston there has been.”