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Aston Martin, Phoenixes and Fires…

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Aston Martin and James Bond have more in common than a joint big-screen adventure every few years. Every Bond movie features a scene where James seems to be facing certain death, but pulls off a near-miraculous escape. Aston Martin has regularly done the same thing. Despite being one of the most revered names in British motoring it has been in receivership seven times in nearly a century of history and has changed hands more often than an old fiver. The difference between Bond and Aston is that you know Bond will always escape, but Aston’s survival has never been certain.

Possibly its worst moment came in 1992; in the midst of a recession and with uncompetitive, overpriced product it built just 46 cars all year. Assuming 24-hour production, Toyota builds that many cars every three minutes. Aston was largely kept alive by the Sultan of Brunei, who would order bizarre special editions, including saloon and even ‘shooting brake’ estate versions of Aston’s two-door coupes, built to his own design by the half-dozen.

But today, Aston Martin builds over 4000 cars a year at its ultra-modern factory in Gaydon, Warwickshire, is profitable, and has a range that has received huge acclaim from the motoring press and punters alike. So where did it all go right?

In 1987, Aston found a sugar-daddy in Ford, which took a majority stake and bought the rest of the company in 1994. Back then, Astons were pure establishment; powerful, traditional, swathed in leather and walnut and laboriously built by hand by very skilled craftsmen. But they were also bulky, far from sexy and often unreliable. The Prince of Wales was Aston’s most famous customer, and a pretty good indication of what the brand stood for back then. Now it beats Apple and YouTube to the title of Britain’s coolest brand.

The £20m Ford paid to buy it was a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions of pounds it pumped in afterwards. But Ford was prepared to play the long game with Aston, because it knew that it had something very special coming in the DB7. This was the car that saved the firm. Designed by Scotsman Ian Callum, now Jaguar’s head of design, the DB7 is on most expert’s list of contenders for the most beautiful car in the world. In 1995, its first full year of production, nearly 700 were made.

But the real transformation was yet to come.In 2000 Aston recruited former Porsche and BMW engineer Dr. Ulrich Bez as CEO. Bez created seminal cars such as the Porsche 993 and 911 Turbo. He had a brilliant vision for Aston Martin; to use the same underlying structure for every car in the range. Known as the VH platform, it’s a lightweight and very rigid structure made of aluminium and carbon fibre to which all the components and bodywork are attached. It first appeared on the DB9 coupe in 2004, and it now underpins - and makes possible - every car in Aston’s much-expanded range bar the One-77, from the Vantage Roadster to the four-door Rapide to the just-revealed new Vanquish.


But Bez’s boldest move came in 2007. Ford, losing a record $12.7 billion a year, decided to cash in on Aston’s success and sell up to shore up its finances. Bez helped to broker the deal with the new owners, led by his friend David Richards, owner of Prodrive. Together they bought 85 per cent of Aston Martin from Ford in a deal valuing it at £479 million.

So are Aston’s dicey days over? Perhaps not. Sales actually peaked at over 7000 in 2007 before crashing again in the downturn; they’ve been recovering slowly ever since. And it needs to begin to replace the DB9 and all the other cars spun off the VH platform: hard and expensive when, even at 4000 cars each year, you’re still an automotive minnow. “The big question is how they finance and develop the next generation of cars when they’re not part of a big group,” says Jay Nagley of Spyder Automotive and a leading car industry analyst. “Producing a beautiful car with a big engine isn’t hard. It’s the boring stuff that’s difficult, like making it meet all the safety and emissions regulations. In the past they could just ring up someone at Ford.”

The New Vanquish

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It's bristling with Carbon fibre, sculpturally detailed, whiffs of the One 77 but retains the VH architecture. It is certainly the most dashing car made in these islands – Aston Martin's brand spanking new V12 superhero is coming.

Launched this week after months of speculation – the car is set to replace the Bondesque DBS and push the Aston brand squarely up against Ferrari – whose front engined V12 the FF occupies the same rarified space.

It's a beautiful thing this car. Though there's a strong feeling evoked in seeing yet another Aston that retains that familiar superstructure - albeit her worked realistically to its interpretive limit – launching in a whole new direction is not something that, in this market, is even vaguely feasible.

Not fixing stuff that ain't broke is a sensible way forward – and there's a dedicated and globally expanding Aston Martin fan base out there that will doubtlessly gobble the Vanquish up. Indeed, with 27 new dealerships opening up in the next year in China alone, we reckon the sexiness of the brand can retain its potency by pushing forward once more on an appealing set of themes.

So, the existing Aston cues are there, the pumped haunches, the low nose and grille, but this design sweeps sculpturally in Carbon fibre, with the texture of the material exposed on the roof, and at the corners of the body and places like the wing mirrors

Miles Nurnberger, Aston’s chief exterior designer told press in advance of the launch that “An Aston always wears a suit...It is assertive, not aggressive; powerful but polite.”. And you can see from the result of his imagination that he looks to have achieved that.

But under the skin, and in its very texture the new Vanquish is pretty trick. The Carbon Fibre makes it almost 60 KG lighter than the DBS Bondmobile, the six litre V12 produces closer to 600 horsepower but still manages to keep in line with forthcoming stricter US emissions regs – and the fourth generation of that familiar chassis is, apparently, significantly stiffer than that which featured in the DBS.

All this is obviously designed to stave off mutterings, that the company needs to innovate a little more obviously than it is doing with the Vanquish – but bare in mind that Ferrari – who rewrote the rulebook with the FF a couple of years ago - have behind it the FIAT behemoth. There's cash in the bank, in other words, to take chances that Aston Martin daren't take. Similarly, Mercedes Gull Winged SLS pushes some boundaries in terms of pure design while remaining relatively conventional under the skin.

Perhaps uncertain times breed conservative decisions. We all want Aston to keep being cool but pay its employees too!

James Bond: Aston Martin DB5

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Images Courtesy RM Auctions

It’s the most famous car in the world. Since the sixties, no small boy’s toybox has been complete without a fully-functioning die-cast model of this car; the 1964 Aston Martin DB5 driven by Sean Connery in Goldfinger and Thunderball. It is easily the world’s most expensive piece of movie memorabilia, a movie star in its own right, and an irreplaceable icon. And the owner let me drive it, for a glorious hour or so, before he sold it at auction for £2.9m in 2010. I also drove the Aston Martin DBS built for Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace. Despite the 45 years separating them, the similarities between the first and latest Bond Astons are remarkable.

The link between James Bond and Aston Martin is probably the longest-running and most valuable product placement in movie history. For Goldfinger and Thunderball, four DB5s were fitted with ‘all the usual refinements’, as Q described them. The pop-out machine guns, tyre shredders, bullet-proof screen, revolving number plates and ejector seat were designed by Oscar-winning special effects guru John Stears, who went on to work on Star Wars. Two of the ‘Bond’ DB5s were used only for publicity. Of the two cars used for filming, one was stolen from a Florida airport in 1997 and is thought to have been broken up.

So of the two cars that actually appear in the movies, only this one – FMP 7B – remains. It was used in the scene where Goldfinger’s Korean bodyguard Oddjob decapitates a statue with his steel-rimmed bowler hat outside the Stoke Park golf club, in the driving scenes where Bond follows Goldfinger’s Rolls-Royce over the Furka Pass in Switzerland, and in the opening scenes of Thunderball, when Bond eliminates a Spectre agent and escapes with the aid of a jet-pack, this car and the comedy goons who obligingly run directly into its rear-mounted water cannons.

For a movie star and a multi-million pound car it’s reassuringly tatty; drive it and you won’t be worried about destroying its value by scratching it. The grey leather seats graced by the young Connery are worn to a beautiful patina, and the long, heavy tyre shredder - which doesn’t pop out, but needs to be attached by hand – lies casually tossed in the back, along with the lump hammer needed to fix it in place.


The four-litre straight-six engine starts instantly, makes a hard, loud howl when worked, and provides acceleration that still feels fairly urgent by modern standards.Even without the gadgets, in 1964 the DB5 was about the fastest, sexiest thing on the road, and, like the Vulcan bomber that co-stars in Thunderball, one of the pinnacles of period British engineering.

As you drive, your thumb keeps flipping up the lid that covers the ejector seat trigger in the gearknob; fortunately for your passenger, it’s one of the few gadgets that doesn’t work. But the secret panel hidden in the armrest controls the good stuff. The switches marked ‘oil’ and ‘smoke’ can be made to work, but ‘m-gun’ only motors the front machine guns in and out; they won’t actually rip you a hole in rush-hour traffic. ‘Bullet-screen’ erects the rear shield, the rotary switch marked S, B and F rotates the Swiss, British and French plates.

By contrast, there isn’t a single gadget on the Quantum of Solace DBS. Daniel Craig’s 007 is a grittier, more realistic character than previous Bonds and he needed a car to match. The only clues to this DBS’s Bond provenance are the engraved plaques on the door sills and the Italian licence plates used in filming which still sit in the boot. They don’t even rotate: so much for progress. You might not get the gadgets, but you do get a movie soundtrack. The DBS howls and bellows; it sounds feral and, frankly, alive.

But it was the DB5 that helped spark the world’s obsession with Bond in the first place. Does that justify spending millions on a vintage Aston that would only be worth £150,000 if it wasn’t for a bunch of gadgets that now look very low-tech in this Avatar age? Watch the reaction of other road users when you extend the ramming bumpers in traffic, and those millions will feel like a bargain.

Aston Martin Lagonda

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To be iconic is not always to be universally loved. Indeed, many icons, of the four-wheeled variety and otherwise, are divisive. The Aston Martin Lagonda firmly fits the bill.

Reviled and admired in equal measure, the Lagonda attains its status thanks to the idiosyncratic nature of both its design and its development. A legend formed by futuristic styling, limited production numbers and an astronomical price tag.

Built in Newport Pagnell, designed for Park Lane but ultimately destined for money-no-object collectors in the Middle East and Japan, the Lagonda was created to help alleviate the financial difficulties that Aston Martin faced in the 1970s.

Instead of playing it safe, the men behind the marque put it all on red, investing in the design and development of an exclusive machine that sought to blend state-of-the-art technology with the comfort of a St James’ members club (and which would require a hefty deposit from all those wanting to join the waiting list).

Considering the oil crisis of the time, a hand-built, four-door luxury saloon with a 5.3 litre V8 engine tucked under its elongated bonnet (the car measured almost five metres in length) may seem like strange logic. But luxury is what Aston Martin always sought to provide and so their rescue strategy was to offer more of the same. Only now in even more limited numbers.

Designed by William Towns, who also styled the DBS, the Lagonda was in production between 1974 and 1990 during which time they produced just 645 cars over four series. Each one took over 2000 man-hours to build, equating to one car produced per week. The Series 2 was launched at the 1976 London Motor Show. Deliveries didn’t begin until 1979.

When the Lagonda went on sale in the United States in 1982, its exclusivity was its unique selling point, with an advertising campaign that featured the car alongside a bottle of vintage Rothschildwine, a ‘Tastes of Refinement’ headline and adcopy that began, ‘Certain of the finer things in life are sufficiently rare they can be enjoyed only by a fortunate few…’

Journalists in the US were blunter. “Ferrari performance and Rolls Royce luxury at a price you can’t afford” said a 1982 review. And talking of theprice, a 1977 Lagonda retailed at £24,570, while a 1980 model would have left you with little change from £50,000 at the time.

But the Lagonda’s price tag wasn’t the only reason that the car was adroit at leaving the public with their jaws agape. The low profile styling, the145mph and 280bhp by way of the 5.3L dual-overhead-cam V8, each with a builder’s plaque attached stating the name of the man responsible for assembling the engine were attention-grabbers. The pop-up headlights, unique at the time, hinted at the technology concealed within.

And it was once inside the Lagonda that you really entered another world. A digital dashboard with displays and touch-button technology, which operated the headlights and just about everything else, seemed positively space age and indeed, the Lagonda was the first production car to use computer management.

But developing electronics in the 1980s was an expensive business (reportedly Aston Martin exceeded their budget for the Lagonda by a whopping 400% largely due to the electronics) and the money you put down didn’t guarantee reliability. Or anything close to it.

So what is the Lagonda’s rightful place in automotive history? A bold statement, conceptuallyahead of its time, hinting at a future full ofpossibility, its wings clipped by technology still in its infancy or a mere design folly, an ugly toy for the uber-rich equipped with a box of electronic tricks, none of which seemed to work?

In the end it’s probably just a matter of taste.

Aston Martin x Zagato

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2012: V12 Zagato All Images Zagato

The V12 Zagato is just the latest in a long line of collaborations between the house of Zagato and Aston Martin. The V12 is a snarlingly exotic but beautifully coherent design that perfectly blends the philosophies of its parents. Stainless steel exhausts, forged lightwight alloys and the distinctive flowing blends of the coachwork make this 'ring- tweaked monster one of the greatest Zagato penned cars ever produced. Limited numbers will guarantee its resonance too.

2002: DB7 Zagato

For me this was an example of Aston Martin trying to guild a very beautiful lily. But what a success! Just 99 of these green beauties were made, with that signature Zagato 'double bubble' roof line and sculptured rear window. Unique interiors, tail lights and alloys made the perfectly proportioned DB7 design sing. That bulbous grille gulps air and accentuates the base - making this production car look fit for endurance racing right out the box.

1986: AM V8 Vantage Zagato.

The burly English officer here gets the Z-treatment, rounding off the edges and launching what was a rather lumpen Aston martin into the rare supercar stratosphere. Caused much ambivalence when launched in the mid Eighties at geneva, around fifty were actually produced and immediately soared in price in resale value. The convertible is even more rare, and doesn't retain the coherence of the coupé's design. Still, a great example of how juxtaposition of design philosophies can sometimes produce bracing results.

1960: DB4 GT Zagato.

The first Z-Aston collaboration was shunted around by racers like Stirling Moss. It was super light and super quick, with perspex and aliminium replacing the glass and steel of the rump DB4. We reckon the Zagato design inspired the more flowing design of all subsequent Aston Martin cars. With only 20 ever having been produced the price of these cars is now well into seven figures - a real piece of design and racing history.