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Soul, Power, Beauty

By Josh Sims. Images by Aston Martin

11 Months Ago

As the creative head of Aston Martin — whose DB11, is, apparently, enough to send even small children into a tailspin — it’s been his job to steer the aesthetic of unarguably one of the most famous marques in automobile history. Of course, the DB11 gets more than the usual attention precisely for being a DB. Those initials — for David Brown, the man who bought what was, at the time, a rather troubled company more interested in racing than manufacturing cars, and steered it into the future — have a resonance for many car-lovers perhaps even beyond that of Aston Martin itself. Back in 1965, you could buy a DB5, for example, for just 9/11d. Indeed, so great was demand that Aston Martin put its name to 2.7 million of them. Unfortunately, these DB5s were made in die-cast metal by Corgi and only in 1/46th scale. On the plus-side, they came with tyre slashers, machine guns and an ejector seat. The car, of course, was the model produced to capture the hearts of small boys perhaps too young to actually see James Bond in ‘Goldfinger,’ the film that kick-started one of the most fruitful of relationships between the producers of what would, in time, become one of the biggest movie franchises in the world, and makers of a kind of car that would come to be seen as being the four-wheeled embodiment of the super-spy himself: sophisticated, thrilling and quintessentially British.

Naturally, that would not be the end of the rocky road. In 1972, financial troubles with a tractor company meant Brown had to offload his beloved car business. The DB9 may have fired the imagination for its two initials, of course, but so much of the sophistication of what would prove one of Aston Martin’s most important recent models lay underneath and out of sight: a carbon fibre transmission tunnel, extruded aluminium bulkhead, braided carbon fibre and honeycombed aluminium A-pillar, cast aluminium windscreen surround or ultrasonically welded part — the latter two both world firsts at Aston Martin — can be a thing of allure and artistry too. But technology can also serve artistry of a more obvious, exterior kind — the kind we fall in love with. Take the DB11 as a case in point — a car heralded as a game-changer for Aston Martin. Its roof strake, for example, flows in an unbroken line from A to C pillar only thanks to a process of extruding, stretching, pressing, laser cutting, polishing and anodising — it’s a lot of work for a little thing. And then there’s the grille. “It’s my favourite part of the car,” says the always boyishly enthusiastic Reichman, a man who, like the rest of us, no doubt lost the little victim of the Corgi DB5’s ejector seat somewhere down the back of the sofa. “There’s a slight undercut that gives it a bit of a shark’s face, and I’m fascinated by sharks.

They have an amazing beauty while also being amazing predators. I wouldn’t want to swim with them but I love watching them swim — and I think an Aston Martin needs to have that same sense of potency too.” A potency with personality — perhaps, at heart, the recipe for Aston Martin’s survival; perhaps, as super-cars become less and less relevant to the road, and more like rare breeds kept for the thrill of the track, the ideal combination to face up to changing times too. Yes, the Aston Martin story may, in the end, be of more value to its customers than breaking distances. “But Aston Martin can’t just sit back and do the same old thing,” as Reichman adds. “It’s always been small and so agile. But we still have to keep thinking ahead.”