The oddities at the Penzance Rotary Club Classic Car & Bike Show included a golden thing that looked like the affair baby of an Alfa Romeo roadster and a Silver Ghost; a three-wheel Messerschmitt Cabin Scooter with the nerve to call itself a cabriolet and a picnic basket on the back, presumably for your body parts after it kills you. But the most beautiful car was the Aston Martin: a Vantage sports car. It is always an Aston Martin unless an understated Ferrari is lurking. Then it is still, probably, an Aston Martin.
The time when a 1960 Alfa Romeo Giulietta was normal has gone, along with the optimism that made it
The Vantage is as gorgeous as the new Aston Martin DB12 S, which I drove in France in May. A few mistakes aside – the Cygnet, their weird coalition-era city car, for example, which looked like the Fiat Panda would if it were sold into sexual slavery in Knightsbridge – Aston Martins just get better. According to the business pages the company is a basket case, but that is part of its myth: it grew out of armaments production and motor-racing. What do you expect – sanity? It is in the moonshot business: a mirror to our fatalism and romance. Without it we’d just have the Mini. There’s nothing wrong with a Mini, but they don’t exude lust.
I wanted to write this without mentioning James Bond and his silver DB5, because it makes me think about the TaxPayers’ Alliance – why is a civil servant driving a £750,000 car (in Skyfall)? You had to fight the DB5 to drive it anyway, and the truth is more heroic. More interesting than Bond – and far richer – was Dave Brown (DB), the most famous of the men who tried to hold the moonshot. The family business David Brown & Sons made the gearboxes for the Spitfire. (I wonder if the Messerschmitt Cabin Scooter is an oblique apology for the Luftwaffe. As in: we only hurt ourselves these days.) I read that when the American War Production Board named five reasons the Axis powers lost they included the survival of this factory in Yorkshire, alongside the invasion of Russia and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and I want to believe it. DB gave his name to the cars.
There are four kinds of Aston Martin now: the sports car; the grand tourer; the DBX (the Formula 1 recovery, or nursing, car); and the Valhalla and the Valkyrie racing cars, which are too valuable for me to put my hands on. I’ll take the grand tourer, but I indicated into the pit lane at Goodwood, and I’ll take this one, because it’s the best Aston Martin GT so far. Let purists talk about the DB5. I don’t want to fight with a motorcar. That is what people are for.
The DB12 S is handsome in a way that is no longer common for anything. The time when, say, a lovely 1960 Alfa Romeo Giulietta was normal – there was also the Jaguar E-Type, the Shelby Cobra, and the Porsche 911 – has gone, along with the optimism that made it. Cars have got better, safer, and much uglier. But not the DB12 S, with its part-Italian heritage: the DB5’s coachwork was designed in Milan. Short at the back, wide at the front with stacked exhausts and the thinnest spokes in history, it preens at me. No wonder men love it – there is always something new to find. Today I think it looks like a carbon-fibre Stradivarius; yesterday, an art deco jewel. Possibly because most modern cars look like panic rooms, this one mashes my head. I feel high driving it, but petrol has always been a drug. People die for it.
I can’t speak for the racetrack, but on French roads it is biddable. The twin-turbo V8 engine may take me from 0-62mph in 3.4 seconds but I feel glued to the road by the specialist Michelin tyres and soothed by the ceramic brakes. The steering is vastly responsive: any fool can drive it. Tolstoy was right: happiness is dull to write about, but not to feel. This is a perfect car, until the next one. I can’t say how the feeling lasts. Do you feel as happy in a DB12 S at ten weeks as at ten minutes, or do you chase the dragon down his roads? But if I could remake my nonexistent financial plan, I would include an Aston Martin GT, and I would be a stranger to myself.
In the old days it was normal for an Aston Martin engineer to covertly install a monster V12 engine in his own car, and you wouldn’t get away with that at Volkswagen. The DB12 S is £205,000 and rising – customisation is everywhere. It’s named Martin for its co-founder Lionel, and Aston for a Buckinghamshire hill it never expected to mount but did. I know how it feels.
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