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" No alcohol was involved in our lunch two months ago with the folks from Aston Martin, yet\u2014inexplicably\u2014an interesting and daring idea came out of the meeting.   We wanted to do something more than a standard road test or a sedate cross-country odyssey with the V-12 Rapide, the stylish and very fast 4-door sports car that Aston introduced late last year, but couldn&amp;#039;t think quite what.  Video Series: Aston Martin Rapide 24 Hour Test Watch Now:Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8  Suddenly Editor-in-Chief Matt DeLorenzo suggested: &amp;quot;What if we drove one around a racetrack for 24 hours? Maybe do it at the exact same time you&amp;#039;re running one at the N\u00FCrburgring 24 Hours.&amp;quot;   Aston&amp;#039;s North American Vice President, Julian Jenkins, and P.R. Director Fran Smith said they thought that would be a fine idea, without visibly flinching or batting an eye.   Hoo boy.   Twenty-four hours is a very, very long time to hammer a dead stock 4300-lb. luxury sports sedan around a racetrack. The track is simply a different place from the highway, a slightly hellish parallel universe in which cars age and wear themselves out at the speed of light. You had to give Aston Martin credit for even considering it\u2014the automotive counterpart of Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke saying, &amp;quot;I can eat 50 eggs.&amp;quot;   On the other hand, there was precedent. Aston has lately taken to signing off on the prototypes of new cars only after they&amp;#039;ve proven themselves in grueling endurance events. Last year, they ran a nearly stock Rapide at the N\u00FCrburgring 24 Hours and finished 35th out of 198 cars entered. An impressive achievement. This year they&amp;#039;d be competing there again, but with race-prepared Zagatos.    So plans went ahead, and DeLorenzo called me in Wisconsin to ask if I&amp;#039;d like to join the other eight drivers in this little test of endurance, which we&amp;#039;d be hosting at Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch, about 50 miles west of Las Vegas in Pahrump, Nevada. Sounded great to me, but I looked at the weather map in our paper and noticed it was 115 degrees Fahrenheit in Las Vegas that day. Hmmm...   A few weeks later, I hopped a flight into Las Vegas and drove a rental car to Pahrump. Our little group convened on a Friday evening, and I got to drive about six practice laps on the fast 2.7-mile outer loop before sundown. A varied and interesting track, if somewhat lacking in monumental landmarks, but by the last lap I almost knew which way to turn.   Our Managing Editor, Andy Bornhop, told me: &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re writing the story, so we want you to drive the first hour on Saturday morning, then the midnight shift and also the last stint on Sunday morning. Beginning, middle and end.&amp;quot;    Great. This would give me three excellent chances to crash the car. First from lack of track familiarity, second from poor night vision, and finally from early morning fatigue, entirely negating our effort.   But I got up in the gray dawn, donned my driver&amp;#039;s suit and headed for the starting line, where our crew of drivers, photographers and two Aston regional after-sales managers\u2014John Strickland and Gary Hyman\u2014stood by. Jenkins and Smith were also there. Jenkins would be driving the fifth shift.   As I buckled into the car, Bornhop said, &amp;quot;We think lap times in the low 2.20s should be fast but sustainable, without burning up our five sets of tires too quickly.&amp;quot;   I headed out of pit row and onto the track with a soulful rip of V-12 sound. We had 5.9 liters here, cranking out 470 bhp at 6000 rpm and 443 lb.-ft. of torque at 5000 rpm. Rear-mounted 6-speed &amp;quot;Touchtronic 2&amp;quot; automatic with quick-acting paddle shifters. Huge 6-piston front calipers. Instantly comfortable and balanced, easy to drive. Near perfect 51/49 weight distribution.    Jenkins had recommended we switch the gearbox and suspension settings to Sport, but keep the stability control on. This saved my bacon during some early exploratory laps, but later limited the amount of power you could lay down while exiting turns. My lap times worked their way down...2.40...2.30...2.20...2.18...2.14. At that point I slid two tires off the exit of the hairpin and made my mandatory trip into the pits to make sure the tires were okay. They were fine. Bornhop said, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;d better slow down or we&amp;#039;ll use up the tires,&amp;quot; so I went back out and ran in the low 2.20s.   I drove for an hour in the growing morning heat and the car ran cool and perfectly. It was a joy to drive, and the hour went by too fast. I pulled in and turned it over to Executive Editor Patrick Hong, the second of our nine drivers.   I changed out of my driver&amp;#039;s suit and assumed my identity as &amp;quot;Pit Board Boy,&amp;quot; running the lap time board out to the start/finish line. Hong drove fast, consistent laps, then turned it over to John Morris, owner of the Spring Mountain facility, who had apparently been around the track before. He turned in some very fast 2.09s, but also burned through the remains of our first of five sets of tires in about 45 minutes, so we knew we&amp;#039;d have to slow things down.    Hour after hour the car circulated, with DeLorenzo, Jenkins and Bornhop lapping with such fast-yet-perfect regularity I briefly considered writing a pit-board message that said, &amp;quot;Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds,&amp;quot; but decided it might cause eyestrain or mind-altering confusion.   The routine was broken only by fuel stops (Shell supplied all the premium we needed) and a sudden duck into the paddock by Jenkins, who reported the paddle shifters had quit shifting. But by the time he coasted to a stop, they were working again.   We soon discovered that the afternoon heat (115 ambient) was pushing the water temp gauge up to the three-quarter mark, at which point the transmission defaulted to normal Drive. If we dropped our shift points about 500 rpm the car cooled down and shifted fine. The big V-12 is so flexible, this made little difference in lap times.   Bornhop also discovered that\u2014once we learned the course\u2014the car was far more satisfying to drive with the stability control in Track mode, so we all started drifting more and laying the exit power down earlier.   Then, while refueling early in the evening, we had our little fire.    We don&amp;#039;t know exactly what happened, but suspect that some fuel vapors wafting into the wheel well were ignited by tire debris that had dropped onto the hot brake rotor, creating a small whoof! of flame. After a minute, our R&amp;amp;amp;T crew decided all was safe and started refueling again (with no vapor recovery system on the filler hose) and got another flash fire from some smoldering plastic. Although we put it out quickly, some semi-melted hoses and wiring caused us to retire our Concours Blue Rapide and switch to the backup Tungsten Silver car Aston had brought along.   Okay. So we wouldn&amp;#039;t be doing the whole thing with one car. But as Edward Abbey would say, &amp;quot;We are here, it is now and all the rest is moonshine.&amp;quot; Get on with it. So after 269 trouble-free laps and 11 hours, we fired up the other car for the final 13 hours of driving. And, fearing we might run low on tires (particularly fronts), we called up the Aston dealer in Las Vegas, who kindly brought us two more sets.   I expected lap times to slow down dramatically after dark, but our Assistant Road Test Editor Calvin Kim, Associate Art Director Bert Swift and track manager David Petrie were as fast and smooth as ever. Faster, even. I, however, discovered my 63-year-old night vision barely qualifies as &amp;quot;vision&amp;quot;, and lost about 8 seconds per lap in a kind of pinball machine cone-aiming experience. I was glad to get out of the car at midnight.    I stole a few hours of sleep in my condo near the track and could wake occasionally and hear the car circulating all night long. Up at 5 a.m., I donned my driver&amp;#039;s suit and headed for the final hour of our test. As I pulled my helmet on, Hong came into the pits with the front right air dam and turn signals all bunged up, having just hit a coyote. No serious damage (to the car) so I jumped in. Aston&amp;#039;s Jenkins looked at me evenly, and said, &amp;quot;Bring it home.&amp;quot;   I went out praying to St. Corrigan, who protects us from brain fade in our hour of need, and managed to lap in the 2.14s without crashing, while skillfully threading through the dead coyote/air dam debris in the hairpin (which was now truly littered with hair). The checkered flag came out and we were done.   Twenty-four hours, 496 laps, 1339.2 miles, six sets of front tires, three sets of rear tires, 279.3 gallons of gasoline, for an average of 4.8 mpg. We used two sets of rear brake pads (thanks in part to the Rapide&amp;#039;s electronic brake force distribution) and, incredibly, no front pads were replaced in either car, owing to the Rapide&amp;#039;s large 6-piston calipers.   Remarkable, the effortless survival of these cars. And\u2014only a few years back in our automotive past\u2014unthinkable.   Meanwhile, at the N\u00FCrburgring 24 Hours, both of Aston&amp;#039;s Zagatos successfully finished 5th and 6th in the SP8 class. They covered 3700 miles, so we can only imagine that some exhaustive talent search has miraculously yielded even younger drivers than I, with better night vision. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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