THE ULTIMATE COUNTRY SQUIRE; New shooting brake is the granddaddy of wagons.(News)

Byline: MATT DAVIS

No, this isn't the first time there has been a powerful Aston Martin shooting brake, but it is the first shooting brake made in Italy and based on the V12 Vanquish. Given the generally clumsy look of most modified luxury shooting brakes, this Turin-Gaydon alliance couldn't help but be an improvement. (Swiss importer Roos Engineering has created a few, including a Series 3 Lagonda treatment from 1987 that defines horrible.)

The Jet 2 looks dramatically better in natural light and in motion than it did sitting still under the harsh fluorescent lights of the Geneva show (AW, March 15).

As previous shooting brakes based on Astons have cost something just short of space-shuttle money to build, Bertone and its exterior design director, Giuliano Biasio, challenged themselves to create a lower-priced variety. A major part of the proposal was to make bespoke coachwork like this an easier reality by not messing with the crash-test points of the two-door Vanquish. This lessens the cost significantly for the builder and, in theory, for the buyer.

Jet 2 came about in the Stile Bertone offices in Capri, Italy, last year. "The Birusa [based on a BMW Z8 chassis] was stylistically much more of a pure Bertone show car,'' says Biasio. "Jet 2 is, in this sense, a more practical proposal that could readily be built in a limited run.''

When we first saw the Jet 2 in Geneva, we thought the back end was a bit overdone, too self-consciously echoing the front end and dash. The entire outer shell has been modified, only the windscreen and the side glass taken straight from the Vanquish. Though the new skin is all fiberglass, a production version would be all aluminum. Biasio tells us, "Putting the Bertone edge into the traditionally curvaceous Aston styling language for a good British-Italian result was the chief challenge.''

In-house at Bertone, the balance struck is called "stile tecnicismo'' or techno styling. When they showed an early version of it to BMW last summer, both BMW design chief Chris Bangle and Aston Martin designer Henrik Fisker loved it.