Welcome to BamfordRose and another question of the week. This week it’s about Q car, Q V12 Vantage S which we’re sitting in at the moment and this one is rather nice. It’s got some really nice carbon interior, lovely colour art going on, on the seats. This is a really really nice car, a really nice place to be in.

This question a week is about noise limits. And this particular car has Aston’s power pack kit fitted to it, so this is the titanium exhaust system. So, this is a secondary catalyst elite and a high flow backbox. Some inlet manifolds which allegedly give the engine, what is it 595-600 bhp here or thereabout. The exhaust noise is really really nice. It’s got a deep bass baritone crackle to it and it’s loud with the secondary catalyst elite and the titanium silencer. So loud in fact that it’s not going to pass any trackday noise regs. Most trackdays in this country now even have a higher noise limit day whereas before there were plenty of no noise limit days. Now there are very few and have been replaced with something like 105 decibels. This car is way way more than 105 decibels from the factory. These are all factory upgrades. How that’s possible with noise drive-by regulation, I don’t know, which is supposed to be 78 decibels.

But anyway, the kit of parts got this particular customer thrown off of Goodwood, which is one of the most sensitive noise tracks in the UK. He went back to Aston for a solution but they couldn’t offer him one which, you know, come on guys, you’ve sold a car which is a track inspired, race-inspired, you’ve performance upgraded the kit, you’ve offered your kit to performance upgrade the car. So, now when the owner wants to take it on track and use it, you basically have no solution to enable that car to pass any noise restrictions. Yeah, leaves the customers coming to us.

What we’ve done is we’ve tapped into the vehicle’s electronics and put a three-way switch in which the car can operate in sport mode, non sport mode, as it always used to. So, I guess the throttle progression differentiation between each mode and now over the top of that in each particular mode, the three-way switch can either give permanent loud, permanent silent or switching as it used to. And it’s the permanent silence that will enable the car to get through probably even a 95 decibels trackday now.

So, we’ll start up a quick listen. Okay, so, this is the loud mode, and if we flick the switch, now we’re going to the quiet mode. It’s lost all its bark. It’s going to take a few bhp off but obviously, the bypass valves are closed. It’s going to introduce the back pressure with that noise restriction but the loss of a few bhp is an obvious compromise and it has to be made to do the trackday.

So, there it is. The three-way switch is nothing new. We have offered that for Gen one Gaydon cars for years. It’s just this is new because it’s the application of that switch to a Bosch energy management system car. And at Bamford Rose, we’re normally about making more power; a byproduct of that is making more noise. So, it’s pretty much the first time around that we’ve had to make less noise.

As always, it really helps us if you can like, subscribe, comment below and turn the bell notifications on, so you never miss a Bamford Rose update.