Aston Martin by Ben Collins — the car world’s answer to Savile Row
This pacy history of a legendary brand is a love letter to an era of gears and gasoline now accelerating towards its twilight
A boy, sketch pad in hand, waits expectantly at the corner of the Brooklands racetrack in Surrey as the leading vehicle heaves into view. Suddenly, caught by a bump, the car and its driver are thrown into the air, before landing in a miracle manoeuvre and haring off down the home straight. The awed 12-year-old was Ian Fleming; the car, one of the first hand-built Aston Martins. A love affair was kindled.
The incident, from 1921, is recounted in Aston Martin, a lively history of the carmaker by Ben Collins, a former racing driver best known as The Stig from BBC’s Top Gear. Years later, Fleming’s fictional spy James Bond would take the wheel of an Aston.
The 007 films made the cars among the most recognised and sought after in the world. Even amid head-turning Maseratis or Ferraris, Aston has kept a dapper image — the car world’s answer to Savile Row.
Yet for all the cool glamour, Aston has long suffered from problems — under the bonnet and on the balance sheet. Its teetering financials figure frequently, from its 1925 bankruptcy — the first of seven — to the admission that Aston was an “expensive hobby” for its longtime owner the late David Brown, whose initials are still found on the DB11 and DBS cars. Its latest owner, the billionaire Lawrence Stroll, is mentioned in passing; a disastrous 2018 initial public offering receives only a single reference.
Yet the book is more than a corporate account of a turbulent enterprise: it is a love letter to an era of gears and gasoline now accelerating towards its twilight. For Collins, whose father’s purchase of a dragon-green Aston sparked a thirst for speed, that past is not just worth remembering, but celebrating.
Ultimately, it is all about the car, the heart of a brand whose vehicles have adorned bedroom walls and bucket lists worldwide, and the men (it is almost all men) who tended them at the expense of their wallets and, for the racing drivers, sometimes their lives. Parts are heavily and unapologetically technical, crammed with details of piston configurations, the crafting of cylinder blocks and everything that goes into fine-tuning a machine built for speed and endurance. It is visceral stuff — and refreshingly analogue in an age of software-driven machines.
Collins also writes of his stunt driving in films, including some Bond ones. Finished as the pandemic struck, his book even overtakes 007’s latest caper, No Time To Die, with details of one car chase that viewers will now not get to see until at least April 2021.
To truly claim a place on tomorrow’s roads, the “prince of British carmakers” will have to adapt. Collins is optimistic. Survival runs through the company like petrol through a finely honed engine. As he writes, “we feel free to reminisce, but Aston Martin’s soul will always belong to the future”.