Almost every boy has dreamed of owning James Bond's Aston Martin, and now one of those boys will do just that – if they have £5 million, writes BEN OLIVER
IT'S THE most famous car in the world. Since the 1960s, no small boy's toy collection has been complete without a die-cast Corgi model of the 1964 Aston Martin DB5 driven by Sean Connery in Goldfingerand Thunderball. Today, in an auction room in London, one of those boys, now probably in his forties, will get to buy the real thing – though at a far from miniature price.
The original Bond Aston is expected to sell for €5.7 million. If it does, it will be the most expensive piece of movie memorabilia and the third most expensive car to be sold at auction.
It is an irreplaceable icon and we have been allowed to drive it. But before we tell you what it is like to get behind the wheel, here's a little history. Four Astons were fitted with "all the usual refinements", as Q described them. The pop-out machine guns, tyre shredders, bullet-proof screen, revolving number plates and ejector seat were designed by Oscar-winning special effects guru John Stears, who went on to work on Star Wars.
Two cars were used for publicity only and despite not having appeared on screen, one sold for $2.1m (€1.5 million) in 2006. Of the two used in filming, the one driven in the chase scene through Auric Goldfinger's factory (actually the Pinewood Studios back lot) was stolen from a Fslorida airport in 1997 and is thought to have been broken up.
So of the cars you see on screen, only this one remains. It was used in the scene where Oddjob decapitates a statue with his bowler hat outside the Stoke Park golf club, in the driving scenes where Bond follows Goldfinger's Rolls-Royce over the spectacular Furka Pass in Switzerland, and in the opening scenes of Thunderball, when Bond eliminates a Spectre agent and escapes with the aid of a jet pack and this car.
This particular car was bought from Aston in 1969 for a bargain $12,000 by Jerry Lewis, an American DJ and radio mogul who has shown it in public only twice since 1977. It has spent most of its life on display at his house and it has never been restored.
From the outside, only the number plates, the outline of the bullet-proof screen in the boot and the ejector panel in the roof mark this car out from a ‘standard’ DB5.
For a movie star that costs €5.7 million, it’s reassuringly tatty. Drive it and you won’t be worried about destroying its value by scratching it. The grey leather seats graced by a young Connery are worn to a beautiful patina and the long, heavy tyre shredder – which doesn’t pop out, but needs to be attached by hand – lies casually in the back, along with the lump hammer needed to fix it in place.
Knowing its next owner will want to drive it, RM Auctions, which holds the record for the most expensive car sold at auction, has given the mechanical parts and the gadgets a make-over.
So the 282-bhp, 4-litre straight-six engine starts instantly, making a hard, loud howl when worked and provides acceleration that still feels fairly urgent by modern standards. It’s easy to forget that, even without the gadgets, in 1964 this car was about the fastest, sexiest thing on the road and, like the Vulcan bomber that co-stars in Thunderball, one of the pinnacles of period British engineering.
As you drive, your thumb keeps flipping up the lid that covers the ejector seat trigger in the gear knob; fortunately for your passenger, it’s one of the few gadgets that doesn’t work. The phone hidden in the door won’t get you through to M, but the “radar scanner” hidden behind a panel in the dashboard at least gives a beep and a flash when you reveal it.
The secret panel in the armrest controls the good stuff. The switches marked “oil”, “nails” and “smoke” don’t do what they promise, but “m-gun” really does make the front machine guns motor out, “bullet-screen” erects the rear shield, and the rotary switch marked S, B and F rotates the Swiss, British and French plates.
Everything moves with a precise sigh and clunk, just as Aston’s craftsmen made it 46 years ago.
They might look appealingly cheesy and low-tech, but it’s the gadgets that mean this car could sell for more than 30 times what you would pay for a standard DB5.
So is it worth it? Watch the reaction of other road users when you extend the ramming bumpers in traffic and that £6 million will feel like a bargain.
