Table of contents for Issue 28 in Vantage

LATEST in the line of ‘Wings Series’ special editions produced by Aston Martin’s ‘Q’ division is this eye-catching DBS Superleggera, inspired by Concorde and launched to mark 50 years since the first flight of the world’s best-known supersonic airliner. The new model was commissioned by Aston Martin Bristol, which is sited close to the Filton factory where the British Concordes were built and which is now home to the last example ever to fly. The project was conceived in association with British Airways, which operated the British aircraft and which has been celebrating its own centenary in 2019. Previous aviation-inspired celebration models have included the Vanquish S Red Arrows Edition, Vantage Blades Edition and V12 Vantage S Spitfire 80. Only ten examples of the DBS Superleggera Concorde will be built,…

CONSIDERING the number of rare cars squirrelled away in garages around the Persian Gulf, the region is visited surprisingly infrequently by the big auction houses, but in late November it hosted three sales in just nine days. RM Sotheby’s hauled 40 four-wheeled lots to Yas Marina Circuit ahead of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, while Worldwide Auctioneers and Silverstone Auctions travelled to the Riyadh Car Show. To those in the tricky business of predicting the future, events in Riyadh were of particular interest. The classic car market in Europe and North America has matured over the last couple of years, and many dealers are pinning their hopes for further growth on the idea that a horde of new buyers from other parts of the world – most notably China –…

Cars are normally created by companies, but this is a story of a company that was inspired by a car. Ian Callum always planned for a career that would last beyond his time as Jaguar’s design director. But having left JLR to set up a design and engineering consultancy, CALLUM, he admits that the stimulus behind the new business’s first car came from his own garage. ‘I saw the price of Vanquishes going up, and thought I’d catch one before it was too late,’ he remembers. ‘This was five years ago, so I’d say I called it pretty well.’ The 2005 car he bought was a fine example of a Vanquish S, but it was also the first time Callum had owned any car he had designed himself. ‘I could…

How the years have flown. From the concept reveal at the Detroit Auto Show in 2003 to the production car debut at the 2005 Geneva show, the ‘AM305’ Vantage was immediately emblematic of a reinvented and revitalised Aston Martin. Here was a car – an achingly desirable one at that – that represented the marque as it had never been seen before. Youthful, dynamic and perhaps most excitingly, positioned at a price point (a fiver under £80,000) that made it attainable to a whole new group of aspirant owners. Designed and engineered as a no-excuses rival for the Porsche 911, it was a bolder statement of intent than the DB9, which though itself all-new remained firmly within Aston’s GT comfort zone. By the time production ceased, more than 24,000 had…

By the time you read this, the first of Aston Martin’s run of 19 DBS GT Zagatos will have been shown at the Audrain’s Newport concours at Rhode Island in the US, along with the ‘continuation’ DB4 GT Zagato that comes with it as a £6m (plus taxes) ‘Centenary Collection’ pair. The centenary in question is that of Italy’s Carrozzeria Zagato, the last two digits of the year marked by the number of Z-flavoured pairs that will be offerd The new DBS Zagato, based on the already rapid DBS Superleggera, gains an extra 45bhp from its twin-turbo V12 engine (making 760) and features what must be the largest front grille ever seen on an Aston Martin. It also lacks a rear window, allowing the Zagato ‘double-bubble’ roof motif to continue…

The very fact that the editor has commissioned this story and that you are therefore reading it is telling. When the previous Vantage came out in 2005, you couldn’t buy one without a manual transmission. Yet now Aston Martin has decided to endow the current-generation car with an additional pedal in its footwell, and that’s worth 1500 words. Good news for an editor with pages to fill; better news still for a journalist with mouths to feed. But best of all for those who crave this increasingly rare additional interface between man and machine? That we shall see. This, then, is the new Vantage AMR, a 200-off limited run of manual Vantages of which 59 special Le Mans edition cars have already been sold, but with at least some of…

WHEN ANDY PALMER became CEO of Aston Martin Lagonda in 2014, he didn’t delay in commissioning the project that has now become the finished DBX you see here. ‘Four days,’ he recalls, ‘and that was only because it took that long to have some serious face time with Marek Reichmann. We talked at length about putting a business plan together for the board within 90 days, and needing an asset at the next Geneva show that I could use as a backdrop for unveiling what would become the Second Century Plan.’ Palmer’s previous role as head of product development for Nissan had already convinced him that this new car needed to be an SUV. ‘The car industry was evolving and tastes were changing, at the top as well as further…

DURHAM-BASED Aston Workshop has developed a package of chassis and powertrain upgrades aimed at making the classic V8 Astons of the ’70s and ’80s safer, more useable and better to drive. The company’s ‘V8 Evolution 6.0’ package includes an extensively reworked, 6.0-litre version of the V8 engine with electronic fuel injection, producing a quoted 430bhp. Replacing the usual three-speed automatic transmission is a choice of Tremec T56 six-speed manual or a modern six-speed auto. Improved cooling and air-conditioning also feature. Chassis upgrades complete the package, with Spax coilovers at all four corners, a thicker front anti-roll bar and a Fosseway Engineering brake upgrade, while there’s a choice of wheel and tyre options to further sharpen the handling. You’ll be able to read a full road test on the first fully…

IN OUR LAST ISSUE we previewed the 2019/20 World Endurance Championship season, looking forward to the new-generation AM9 Vantage building on its strong end to an otherwise difficult 2018/19 season in GTE Pro, and anticipating great things from its first showing in the GTE Am category. Three months on and things could scarcely be going better, with podium finishes in the first three rounds of the season, including wins in both Pro and Am classes. The season began at Silverstone, where the weather played a pivotal part in a somewhat chaotic race, thanks to multiple safety car periods throwing carefully crafted race strategies into turmoil. The #97 Vantage of Alex Lynn and Maxime Martin led comfortably for the first few stints, but dropped down the order after making an extra…

The Aston Martin V8, 1969-2000 From £600 palawan.co.uk The classic V8s are the leviathans of the Aston Martin story. So it is fitting that they are celebrated in a tome as weighty, imposing and sumptuously produced as this latest limited edition from highly regarded Palawan Press. Author Russell Hayes draws on first-hand accounts to paint a vivid picture of a tumultuous time, and the book is lavishly illustrated with new and period photographs. Only slightly less weighty is a companion volume, the V8 Register, which details the main differences between the models and lists chassis numbers, colours and specs as the cars left the factory. Simply superb. Bond Peacoat by Billy Reid $695 billyreid.com It was originally named after Billy Reid’s Bond Street store in New York and not after…

I wonder how many people appreciate when they see almost any pre-war Aston Martin, that its creation would have had nothing whatever to do with Lionel Martin, the man whose surname combined with Aston Hill to create the marque we know today? Because although by almost any standards Aston Martin made only tiny quantities of cars after Martin departed the scene in 1925, compared to what had been created on his watch it was like a General Motors factory on a triple shift. Pre-war cars made after he left outnumber those made while he was still at the company by at least ten to one. Which makes driving a Lionel Martin-era Aston Martin, such as the one you see here, an extremely rare and special privilege. The very first ‘Aston-Martin’…

It was a deeply enjoyable two days spent in Wales with our six Vantage variations. The company was great, the scenery magnificent and the cars were just brilliant – each of them different to the next, but each covetable in their own way. And by no means overshadowed was the car that, on paper at least, was the lowliest of the six – the early 4.3. A 2007 example in Grigio Alloy – a subtle metallic that suits the Aston wonderfully well – it had covered just 22,000 miles. Which in one sense is a lamentably low mileage for a car as thoroughly useable as an AM305-generation Vantage, but it also meant that it felt tight and taut with absolutely loads of life left in it. We borrowed it from…

The DB4 GT Zagato. So good they made it thrice. That’s a cheap gag about a multi-million-pound car, but it gets to the heart of this 2019 continuation. Not only following in the wheeltracks of the original machines built in 1961, this batch of 19 Newport Pagnell-built continuations joins the four ‘Sanction II’ cars built with Aston Martin’s blessing in 1989. Some of you will embrace Aston Martin building these cars, other will take issue with it. One thing we can all agree on is that there are few more emotive topics in the classic car world than continuations. Part of me feels uneasy about there being another 19 DB4 GT Zagatos in existence. But another part feels that there’s no issue because nobody is going to pass off one…

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AFTER MAKING its dynamic debut at the 2019 British Grand Prix, where it completed a handful of demonstration laps, the Valkyrie development prototype returned to Silverstone in November for three days of testing on Aston Martin’s Stowe Circuit test facility in the hands of factory racer and development driver Darren Turner. Running to a rev limit of 9000rpm (still some 2500rpm shy of the red line) Turner braved torrential rain to put invaluable miles on the Adrian Newey-designed hypercar. He certainly earned his money as the precious prototype was without any form of ABS or traction control. Nevertheless the Valkyrie looked and sounded mesmerising, with huge rooster-tails of spray lifted from the track surface by Newey’s extreme underfloor aerodynamics and the wailing, naturally aspirated Cosworth-built 6.5-litre V12 echoing across the…

IN THE YEAR when Brexit did not happen, classic motorsport or any other activity with our beloved cars has been a welcome distraction, right across Europe. There has been a rich end to the season of motorsport and numerous reminders that politicians will always be outlasted by great Aston Martins. But enough of the political manifesto. The sun shone brightly again on Goodwood for the annual nostalgia fest that is the Revival. While the Jaguars were having their own race, the field for the Freddie March Trophy was graced by no fewer than three DB3Ss, and for once it was Urs Müller from Switzerland who had the upper hand over Wolfgang Friedrichs, coming an impressive 11th overall, while bookending the trio of 3s was Urs’ wife Arlette in her ex-Angela…

There’s a suitably reverential hush as the leather-bound albums are taken from their storage cases. Any collection of press cuttings and photos chronicling the earliest days of Aston Martin would be fascinating enough, but these are the personal scrapbooks of company co-founder Lionel Martin. Leafing through these time-worn pages really does feel like holding history in your hands. The albums are among the many treasures housed at the Aston Martin Museum at Drayton St Leonard in leafy Oxfordshire. They were secured by the Aston Martin Heritage Trust when they came up for sale at the 2009 Bonhams Aston Martin Works sale. The vendor had been left them by Lionel Martin’s son, John Martin, who personally vouched for their authenticity. And now they’re in the protective custody of the museum, which…

I bet plenty of you have wondered why Aston Martin became the title sponsor of the Red Bull Racing Formula 1 team. After all, Aston has always made its racing home within the world of closed-wheel sports cars. Why should it suddenly seek to associate itself with a single-seater formula? The reason is purely commercial, and it actually also explains the strategy behind the Valkyrie and Valhalla hypercars: in future, a mid-engined sports car will be a core component of Aston Martin’s mainstream offer, the car inheriting the Vanquish nameplate. But Aston lacks any presence or credibility in the mid-engine market, and that is what the F1 association plus the Valkyrie and Valhalla are there to build. But nor is Aston Martin even now entirely devoid of racing heritage at…

One Zagato Continuation is pretty special. To see a line of them being assembled is off the scale. The continuation production line has taken over large parts of the Aston Martin Works site in Newport Pagnell – and for anyone with a romantic bone in their body, seeing car making re-established at what many still regard as the spiritual home of Aston Martin is genuinely affecting. They started making Astons on Tickford Street back in the mid-1950s. All the great David Brown road cars were built here: DB MkIII, DB4, DB5, DB6 and DBS. All the classic V8s, too, right up to the very end of the 1990s. And then the V12 Vanquish, the first Aston of a new millennium. Ironically, one of the few models not built here in…

I look forward to the fourth generation taking over,’ quips Antony Forshaw, the current managing director of Aston Service Dorset. Antony represents the third generation of the same family to head this most idiosyncratic of Aston specialists, founded by his grandfather 85 years ago. And he’s pretty sure it won’t stop with him: apparently the next generation is already waiting in the wings. Perhaps uniquely, Aston Service Dorset has had its path defined as much by Lagondas as Astons. Sitting under covers in one of the garages are the four cars of the entire 1929 Lagonda Le Mans team. The business’s founder, grandfather Ivan, born in 1911, was a great Lagonda enthusiast and in 1934 established a modest business dealing in Lagonda parts in Poole, just down the road from…

It was indicative of the transformational changes he would go on to implement that, despite the perceived incongruity of a German becoming the figurehead of that most British of sports car brands, Ulrich Bez unflinchingly embraced the role of running Aston Martin Born in 1943 and raised in the Stuttgart suburb of Bad Cannstatt, Bez joined Porsche as an apprentice, then studied aeronautical engineering at the University of Stuttgart before returning to Porsche in the R&D department. After earning a doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin, he then pursued a varied career that saw him in senior roles at BMW, Porsche, Daewoo and Ford. Vehicle research and development was his forté, and it would be these well-honed skills that would see him lead a dynamic era at Aston Martin…