Sommaire pour Issue 23 de Vantage

ANOTHER BUSY YEAR for the Aston Martin Owners Club draws nearer to a close: one in which sumptuous weather has encouraged members to enjoy their cars even more than usual, which can only be a good thing. The two biggest events of the summer were the le mans Classic and Silverstone Classic, both attended by hundreds of AMOC members who enjoyed plenty of Club hospitality and the chance to meet up with old friends. Another highlight saw the Club join forces with bonhams to present the auction house’s annual aston Martin Sale alongside the AMOC Spring Concours. Englefield House, near Pangbourne in Berkshire, provided the perfect setting. bonhams enjoyed a bumper sale, and the Club hosted some 400 Astons, which fairly sparkled in the sunshine: a fine way to spend…

We’re munching fish and chips by the beach on hayling island, snapper tim andrew and i. parked yards away is a metallic green sports tourer of early post-war style, curvaceous and imposing. people are intrigued by it as they head to the sand and the sea. ‘what is it?’ we hear them ask each other. then they see the nose, parked facing the fence. ‘wow! it’s an aston martin!’ Indeed it is, but not an Aston anyone recognises. This does not conform to their mental template, doubtless Bond-influenced, of an old Aston Martin. They don’t quite believe it until the reality of the identity has had a chance to settle. It’s not surprising that they haven’t seen one before, because only 14 were built. Nor had I until today, other…

I wonder what could be engineered from scratch for £3.5 million for a company such as Volkswagen. A door handle perhaps? A windscreen wiper system? Maybe a new front bumper or wheel design? I don’t know. What I do know is that in the late 1980s £3.5 million is what it cost Aston Martin to develop what was presented to the world as its first all-new car in over 20 years. I know this because I was told by the man who wrote the cheque, the late Victor Gauntlett, the larger-than-life chairman of Aston Martin who looked like he should have been a retired RAF pilot, no doubt because he was. Half overgrown schoolboy, half hard-nosed businessman (his words, not mine), it was Gauntlett who faced down a board-level bid…

I’d like to borrow a car, and I’d like it to be delivered in as filthy a condition as possible.’ It was, I’ll admit, an unusual request to put to the Aston Martin press office at Gaydon. ‘It would rather go against the grain,’ mused the PR man, whose press garage prides itself on providing cars only in the finest, eat-your-dinner-off-it condition. ‘Might I ask why?’ So I explained how we planned to enter a car in an Aston Martin Owners Club concours, how we wanted to do all the ‘prep’ ourselves, and that by starting with a dirty car we’d get a taste of what entrants go through to achieve that famous ‘concours condition’. ‘Sure, no problem,’ came the reply. ‘Would a Rapide S be OK?’ A Rapide S…

If you’d written Victor Gauntlett as a character for some Saturday night BBC drama, he’d likely be rejected as simply too implausible. You might read about a Gauntlett in a Bulldog Drummond story, but such larger-than-life people were all works of fiction. Except that he was real. Meeting Victor for the first time was like standing in the sea waiting to be flattened by a 12 foot wave of ebullience. He’d march towards you, arm outstretched, grinning from ear to ear in an immaculately tailored double-breasted suit complete with gold watch chain. Conversation was never hard. He was a dream interview because you only needed one question to point him in the right direction and he could thereafter be relied upon to do your job for you. You’d emerged drenched…

AFTER THE LONG SUMMER BREAK, the World endurance Championship returned in mid-August for the six hours of silverstone – the third round of the extended 2018/19 ‘super season’. Aston Martin racing’s home race came on the back of a disappointing le Mans 24 hours in which the new Vantage GTE struggled for pace. some of this was due to the team’s lack of experience running on Michelin tyres, having switched from running Dunlops in previous seasons. A general lack of race mileage with the new car was also a contributing factor. The acid-yellow cars were handed some balance of Performance (BoP) concessions post-qualifying at le Mans, but with the 24 hour race running a different boP to the other WEC rounds due to the unique nature of the circuit, AMR…

For a long time the job of a critic was to separate art from artist, to assess a piece of work without worrying too much about whether the person who made it was… a piece of work. today that approach would be considered almost irresponsible by readers, which is why Peter Sellers is now inevitably called a ‘flawed genius’, and often much worse. He had an incredible ability to disappear into a character, no matter how thinly written or ridiculous. today this ability is presented as the tragic talent of a man who never got comfortable in his own skin. on screen he had wonderful comic timing, but his gift for making people laugh seems now to be considered notable mostly because it was so seldom evident when the camera…

Aston and Healey I enjoyed the wonderful write-up of the ‘Project’ racing car DP215 in the latest edition of your magazine to hit the newsagents here in Australia (issue 22), and I thought readers might be interested to hear about a David Brown connection with another Great British sports car marque of the period. I was a long-time friend of Donald Healey, who was in turn a great friend and business associate of Sir David Brown. The Donald Healey Motor Company in Warwick produced some beautiful alloy-bodied sportsracing cars, which I’ve always thought were like small Aston Martins, and these cars achieved great things at Le Mans in the 1960s, being the first British cars home for several years, while Healey 3000s also did incredible things at Sebring, fitted with…

‘The new DBS Superleggera should be just my kind of Aston Martin’ Monsters. Magnificent monsters with muscle, manners and irresistible magnetism. That’s what Aston Martins were all about when I was a lad. Back then it was the X-Pack Vantage that did Newport Pagnell’s bidding, facing down the Italian exotics and ruthlessly effective Teutons with classic British decorum, walnut veneer and a sodding great V8. It was followed by the wide-bodied Virage 6.3 – a ferociously costly but undeniably effective hotchpotch of special order engine and chassis upgrades – and the twinsupercharged Vantage V550 and V600. That my formative years as a motoring journalist coincided with privileged access to the last of these formidable and unashamedly anachronistic brutes means a piece of my heart will always belong to these excessively…

‘Do you really think that’s wise?’ For some reason, the voice of Dad’s Army’s Sergeant Wilson has popped into my head. It’s just after I’ve committed to an overtake in the middle of the Porsche Curves, that very fast series of corners with a reputation for punishing the over-adventurous… Sgt Wilson probably has a point. Racing at Le Mans is a serious business. The full 13km circuit may look straightforward but there is a lot to learn and opportunities to practise driving it at speed are very limited. That’s because most of it is still public road – the Mulsanne straight, for example, also happens to be the main road to Tours – and it is closed for racing for as short a time as possible. It’s just one of…

It was something the owner said that got me thinking: which are the best road cars ever made? ‘I used to own a Ferrari 275,’ he said, ‘the fourcam model, and one guy told me: “That’s the best road car Ferrari ever made.” You know, I really feel the same about this car, it’s so little known or understood, but I think it’s the best road car that Aston Martin ever made.’ Best road cars? Several spring to mind: an early BMW M5; Bentley Speed Six; Lancia Aurelia B20; Mercedes-Benz W124 500E; Vauxhall 30-98; perhaps an Alfasud; maybe a Citroën DS… It’s a great pub game, whiling away the hours, each choice with its own parameters and a chorus of objections. But what of this car, chassis number DB4/857/R, a…

LEADING ASTON MARTIN specialist nicholas mee & Co has a new home. the company has relocated from London to impressive new premises near Essendon, Hertfordshire, and has ambitious plans to expand its operations. the new base is a dramatic change from the rather cramped showroom and separate workshop location of the old business. now all the operations – sales, servicing, restorations, parts – are together on one site. and a very impressive site it is, too, part of the Hatfield Park estate. a newly constructed showroom, capable of holding 22 cars, sits alongside historic oak-framed buildings specially reconstructed to provide fully equipped servicing and restoration facilities, along with a parts store and new trim shop. When we caught up with managing director nick mee in mid-summer, the final stages of…

AFTER SNOW AT GOODWOOD this year it was inevitable that the ‘polar’ opposite would follow, but the extent and duration of the hot summer and its demands on old cars were nonetheless a welcome surprise, even for those in the hot confines of racing astons. the silverstone Classic saw scorching weather, a big international crowd and a vast numbers of great cars. as the years advance, so new cars become ‘classics’ and this year saw the debut masters race for modern GT and prototype cars. the DBR9 may not seem like a classic but a modern one it certainly is. the race also featured a pair of GT2S, but second overall was the Lola-aston DBR1-2 of Christophe d’ansembourg with a fastest lap of 113mph. we can expect to see more…

What is it with British secret agents and Aston Martins? Cinema audiences famously cheered during screenings of the Bond movie Skyfall when 007 opened his lock-up to reveal his beloved DB5. There were similar cheers during showings of the original Johnny English film when the titular hero launched a missile from his DB7 Vantage to take out an incriminating Gatso speed camera. There are missiles, too, in the new Johnny English film, the third in the series, which opens in early October. There is also, as you may have gathered by now, an Aston Martin… Johnny English has always been something of a Bond tribute act, which naturally enough extends to the cars and the gadgets. In his second outing, 2011’s Johnny English Reborn, our hapless hero had his head…

It’s not the recommended way to tackle Le mans: climb into an unfamiliar car that has just been brought into the pits in 2nd place in the middle of the night and join a full-on race, having completed less than two laps’ practice (and those laps being in daylight). not just any racing car, either. tom alexander’s dB4 Gt has a distinguished history (see sidebar overleaf) and is worth a small fortune. no pressure then… For anyone who hasn’t experienced it – and everyone really should – the Le mans classic is held every two years and spans all eras of the world’s most famous endurance race, with the entries divided into ‘plateaus’ so that cars of the same period race together. each plateau gets three 45-minute races spread across…

NOT SINCE THE ’70s LAGONDA WEDGE had a car produced by Aston Martin elicited such an extreme reaction. At its launch in 2010, people either loved or hated the Cygnet, and it’s fair to say there were more haters than lovers. Eight years on, there probably still are. But talk to owners and you’ll find there’s a good deal of affection for Aston’s baby, while values have risen steadily over the last couple of years. Time, then, to re-evaluate the Cygnet as an ownership proposition. There are a number of ways of looking at the Cygnet (not counting from behind the sofa): as an affordable entry point to Aston Martin ownership; as a collectors’ piece with the potential to make you a tidy return; and as a companion for the…