Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2015 i Vantage

AS WE CLOSE FOR PRESS, the chequered flag has just fallen on the nürburgring 24 hours. aston was there in strength, with aston martin racing entering two factoryrun V12 Vantage gT3s, while the gaydonbased aston martin engineering team fielded three cars: a pair of race-prepared Vantage gT12s and a Vantage n430. Typically, the race was both unpredictable and unforgiving, with patchy rain early on making tyre choice and driving conditions exceptionally difficult. oil spilled by another car almost claimed the much-fancied #007 bilsteinliveried Vantage gT3 during the night, but a herculean effort by the amr team saw the extensive damage repaired and the car – crewed by darren Turner, stefan mücke and pedro lamy – rejoin the fray, eventually finishing 16th overall. amr’s sister #006 Vantage gT3 ran as high…

email us eds@vantagemag.co.uk Write to us Vantage magazine, 5 Tower Court, Irchester road, Wollaston, Northants NN29 7PJ A night to remember I thought your readers might be interested in a story about my late father’s Aston martin. Some 25 years ago I was living in Hersham, surrey, and every Thursday a group of us went to the Bricklayers Arms for a few pints and to talk about cars. I was restoring a Healey 100 at the time and needed a bit of moral support! One Thursday there was a change of plan. my friend steve had heard there was a talk at nearby Brooklands and suggested we go there instead, so off we went. During the evening, I asked the chap giving the talk if he knew anything about an…

PETER LIVANOS is something of an enigma. A very private man, he is seldom seen in public and rarely gives interviews. He is also a highly astute and influential businessman, his main focus being his whollyowned family shipping business (though he has many others): Ceres Hellenic Shipping Enterprises, founded by Livanos’s great-grandfather in the 1920s, is one of Greece’s foremost shipping lines. Educated in Switzerland and the United States, where he studied industrial engineering, he is an accomplished yachtsman and holder of an Honorary Doctorate of Science at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. And then there's the Aston Martin connection. Livanos's wealth (personal fortune currently estimated at in excess of a billion pounds) has allowed him to indulge in his well-known passion for cars, most notably Aston Martins. Indeed, the purchase of…

My calves hurt quite a lot by the time Kenny P had finished getting that photo. We’d planned to get a simple static shot of the Vanquish S, but Kenny decided it would be a nice scene-setter to have me on tiptoe, looking into the old factory on Tickford Street. It was lucky that it was me there and not Richard Meaden – he would never have been able to see over those gates, even on tiptoe. The Vanquish was the last Aston to be made in Newport Pagnell and so, to mark the end of production both of the car and at the site, in 2007 Aston announced 40 Vanquish S Ultimate Editions. In fact, 50 were eventually built (20 right-hand drive and 30 left-hand drive) and this was…

‘By the time I’m 65, robert will have bought the business,’ says Andy Bell. ‘I’ll still have a few cars of my own that I want to finish off, and in four years’ time I’m sure I’ll still be in the workshop. even now, with robert’s arrival, I’m doing what I love to do. I much prefer to be down here than in the office.’ robert (on the right) is less able to be hands-on, although he would like to be and is learning the skills. ‘There’s lots of scope in the office, and that probably takes half my time. One of my projects has been to computerise the parts catalogue, which is now online, and introduce a barcode system for approximately 1500 parts. Now we scan a part rather…

IT’S HARD NOT TO like Andy Palmer. Aston Martin’s new boss is one of the motor industry’s more affable personalities, direct and approachable in a way that most senior executives are not. He doesn’t suffer fools, or foolish questions, gladly – but he’s more than happy to talk about the future and, when he can’t get too specific, to drop broad hints. That was true when he was head of product development for Nissan, and happily it seems to be just as much the case now he’s CEO of Aston Martin Lagonda. His move to Gaydon was one that few people saw coming. Palmer had been at Nissan for 23 years, working his way up from heading the company’s UK technical centre to become arguably the most senior Brit in…

IF THE WIND has settled and the barometer risen, then Astons will be seen being used in earnest at the plethora of road and race events available to drivers this year. Already we have seen the Mille Miglia and tour de france, but the season arguably kicked off with the fine donington historic festival in early May, now a firm fixture on the calendar with large entries including a diverse selection from the Aston Martin fraternity. Many Astons took part in the festival, from Christopher Scott-McKirdy’s 1933 Le Mans to wolfgang friedrichs’ 1963 dP214 replica. the 1959 dBR4 Grand Prix cars of Marc Valvekens and freidrichs battled it out in the pre-1966 GP race with the former coming out on top, both cars reminding us that they were fabulous david…

PERCEPTIONS ARE NOT easily shifted, and until very recently – 9 May, to be precise – we had always thought of sir Peter Ustinov as the secondbest Poirot, but following Bonhams’ 16th aston Works sale we will forever know him as the lucky beggar who for a time enjoyed the 1962 DB4 series 4 Vantage convertible pictured below. Offered for sale from a private collection in switzerland, and with four previous owners in addition to the second-best Poirot, it brought £1,513,500 including premium, a sum commensurate with its rarity (just 70 DB4 convertibles were built), condition (beautiful), and provenance (Ustinov was a towering talent, even if his version of agatha christie’s Belgian detective was slow and clownish, with a ridiculous accent). The DB4 was one of two cars to crash…

This is a very promising motor car,’ said David Brown to the designer Harold Beach after his first drive of the DB4 in 1958. It was a promise that would be fulfilled beyond anyone’s expectations. Demand for the DB4 greatly outstripped the ability to supply cars for many years and the DB4 would evolve through five different series between 1958 and 1963, by which time the car was virtually the DB5. Indeed, the original Bond car was a Series 5 DB4, not a DB5, but good luck trying to tell the world that Bond ejected a man from a DB4. On a sun-filled spring day outside the old Newport Pagnell buildings is a sight that stops Aston employees and blasé Newport Pagnell inhabitants in their tracks. Not just a DB4…

Mr JL Hopkins of Manchester was not impressed with his purchase. He had bought a car directly from Aston Martin Lagonda Limited, described as a ‘used Lagonda Saloon’ in AML’s letter of June 6 1975 enclosing the registration book and the MoT certificate. We don’t know how much he paid, but there was plenty wrong with his car. It smoked. Water leaked into the footwells. The electric windows were either slow or static. Much trim was damaged. The air-con didn’t work. The respray was poor. And so the list went on. In his letter of August 6, Mr Hopkins announced his intention to visit the factory to check, personally, the standard of rectification work. His handbuilt car was, it seems, about to be handbuilt all over again. In Aston Martin’s…

A DOWNTURN in the fortunes of the David Brown group of companies forced Sir David to sell AML – reluctantly – in 1972. And so, after a long period of stability, the Newport Pagnell factory entered the most turbulent period of its history. New owner Company Developments kept the factory ticking over, but economic troubles in the wider world meant these were difficult times for a small, luxury car maker. Eddie Colton (pictured right) well remembers those days. He had arrived at Newport Pagnell in the mid-60s as a mechanic in the service department, later moving across to road test rectification, checking the cars for faults as they reached the end of the assembly line. There was certainly no shortage of faults to be rectified! ‘The back axles gave us…

When a business has been to the brink as many times as Aston Martin, the list of company saviours is long and distinguished. David Brown. Victor Gauntlett. Peter Livanos. Walter Hayes. Minky... ‘WHO?’ I hear you cry. You’d better allow me to explain. The early ‘90s were particularly tough for Aston Martin. The transition from much-loved V8 Vantage to the slightly awkward-looking, less-than-incendiary Virage left top-end customers lukewarm, while the all-new DB7 (another saviour) was still a little way off. Whichever way you cut it, Aston was lacking a flagship capable of firing a broadside at the Italian exotica of the day. Step forward the Aston Martin Lagonda Customer Service Division (aka Works Service), who took the all-too-polite Virage and made it into something altogether more explicit: the Virage 6.3.…

AFTER THE BONHAMS works sale at newport pagnell on saturday may 9, sunday saw another highlight of the aston martin year, the amoc spring concours, held just down the road in the grounds of woburn abbey. The timing and location couldn’t have worked better, and the club was rewarded with superb weather and a hugely impressive turnout, astons stretching as far as the eye could see. lagondas, too, with a jaw-dropping line-up of 1970s ‘wedges’ and a rare opportunity to view the new taraf supersaloon. Another star car was the mkii long chassis sports tourer of david bracey. this handsome pre-war aston had graced the aston martin stand at olympia back in 1935, the same year that amoc was founded, which is why it has been chosen as the ‘feature…

AWAY FROM NEWPORT PAGNELL there has been plentiful, if largely unremarkable, Aston-related auction activity over the last three months, with DB7s as usual accounting for a large proportion of cars sold and, as usual, making the sort of money that enabled us to include the DB7 V12 among our selection of ‘£30k Astons’ in the last issue. In the year of its 50th birthday the DB6 has continued its steady rise into the realm of the mega-money classics, with a nicely preserved, single-owner 1970 Mk2 Vantage offered by RM Sotheby’s at Amelia Island commanding $700,000 (£474,500). Delivered new to Canada and with every option going (including 12 pints of antifreeze, amusingly), it looked a corker, the like of which are only going to become harder to find. Given that Historics…

ON MAY 1 THIS YEAR, when Geoff Duke passed away at the fine age of 92 on the Isle of Man – the scene of so much of his success and his home for most of his adult life – British motorsport lost a man who had quite literally become a legend in his own lifetime. In the early 1950s, Duke was one of this country’s most prominent sports stars. In fact, with six World Motorcycle Championships to his credit, plus six Isle of Man TT wins and the honour of being crowned Britain’s ‘Sportsman of the Year’ in 1951, he was a ‘superstar’ before that term had even been invented. Back in the early 1950s, there were really only two names from motorsport that regularly featured in the UK…

DAVID BROWN was an inspired matchmaker. When he bought Lagonda in 1947 he acquired not only the WO Bentley engine that would power a generation of Astons, but also many of the firm’s skilled staff, including body designer Frank Feeley and engine man Willie Watson. The acquisition of the Tickford factory in 1955 brought a similarly impressive range of skills to Aston Martin, for the coachbuilding traditions of the site stretched back a remarkable 125 years. Salmons Carriage Works was established in 1830 in Tickford End, at that time a distinct hamlet aside from Newport Pagnell. By the late 1800s the works had grown into Salmons and Sons in Tickford Street and occupied the site we know today. The area where Aston Martin Works is now was the timber yard,…

Has there ever been another car launch quite like it? It’s almost 40 years since the extraordinary Lagonda wedge was unveiled, but you can still almost sense the shockwaves today. As we explain elsewhere in this issue, it was all the more extraordinary for the fact that Aston Martin had just emerged from some of its darkest hours: the factory at Newport Pagnell had actually closed in 1974 before reopening in 1975 under ambitious new owners. And in a move that still seems audacious today, the new management team quickly gave the go-ahead to a radical-looking four-door from the pen of chief stylist William Towns. Towns’s astonishingly low, futuristic Lagonda was shown to the motoring press at the Bell Inn at Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire on October 12, 1976, and…

Can you remember your Aston Martin epiphany? The moment when your passion was ignited? I can, like it was yesterday. Being a child of the early ’60s, I’d played with my cousin’s Goldfinger DB5 and pored over photos of DB6s in my dad’s copies of Motor Sport. But living in a small village in Northamptonshire, I’d never actually experienced an Aston ‘in the metal’. That all changed in the summer of 1973. I was 12 at the time, the Aston was an AM V8, and when it appeared in our close it might as well have been Fireball XL5 or Thunderbird 2. It was there because a local advertising agency had managed to blag it for a photoshoot, and I knew this because my mate Richard’s dad worked for said…

IT WAS ford money in the early 1990s that finally brought Aston Martin the stability it had so often craved. And while a new plant was acquired at Bloxham to build the DB7, there was welcome investment at Newport Pagnell, too, the craftsmen (and women) at Tickford Street bringing their skills to bear on a new generation of handbuilt Astons, from the Virage Volante to the mighty twin-supercharged Vantage. There was a final chapter in the story of Newport Pagnell-built Astons, too, in the glorious shape of the V12 Vanquish. But AML was entering its modern era, with much higher production targets and a brand new factory at Gaydon. When the last Vanquish left the line in 2007, it was a sad day in many ways – and an emotional…