The Continuing Classics

It was also the only car factory in the world to have its own cricket pitch. Aston Martin chose this site in Buckinghamshire due to its proximity to the M1, the UK’s first motorway, which it used as a test track. There were no speed limits then.

Now, the service centre on the other side of Tickford Street remains a hive of operations, maintaining Aston’s back catalogue. Aston built 13,300 cars in Newport Pagnell over the course of 52 years, ending in 2007 with the Vanquish that Pierce Brosnan destroyed as James Bond in Die Another Day.

Today, the company builds more than 6,000 units every year at their Gaydon plant, 40 miles away in Warwickshire. Now, though, with models from the late 1950s and ’60s regularly reaching seven-figure sums at auction, Aston has turned back the clock and begun building extremely limited-run models, just as they were under the Macmillan government of the day.

The DB4 GT Zagato is among the most valuable and lusted-after sports cars of all time. Nineteen were built between 1960 and 1963 in the very workshop that Aston Martin still occupies here today. Essentially, they were race versions of the DB4 GT, lightened and restyled by Italian coachbuilder Zagato. Fifty-six years later, the company is now building another 19 ‘continuation’ units.

Aston are not alone in engaging the flux capacitor and going back to simpler times. While they were probably the first to float the idea of continuation cars, back in 2014, Jaguar beat them out of the blocks by delivering six Lightweight E-types and nine XKSS continuation cars in 2016, priced in excess of £1 million each. Two years later they produced 25 more D-Type racers.

Bentley is about to go back even further in time, to their 90-year-old 4½-litre Blower. The price of these extra 12 bellicose British Le Mans winners is strictly POA, though Aston assure me it’s less than their Zagato, not least because the Aston comes with a stunning bonus track. The DB4 GT Zagato Continuation is being sold as a twin-pack with the state-of-the-art Gaydon-built 211mph DBS Superleggera, skinned in a bespoke GT Zagato suit and, again, limited to just 19. The price reflects demand: £6 million for the pair.

Sorry for dribbling. Sitting under its original 1955 roof and watched over by a wooden owl that’s been perched on a truss, scaring off pigeons for all these years, the workshop feels like a Hornby factory.

Stalwart Paul Spires, president of Aston Martin Works, tells me: “Everything is in miniature here,” compared to the Gaydon plant, “but the problems are the same size”. It’s not a museum, it is a working atelier. In addition to 40-odd customer-owned Astons undergoing service or restoration, there are three of the continuation DB4 GT Zagatos having their final parts installed. All the parts are new, but based on digital scans of the originals.

The craftsmen use the same artisan skills that have been passed down generations. It requires 4,500 painstaking hours’ work per car. The materials are either the same or improved. Significant investment has been made to tooling, and the fit and finish is actually far superior to that of 1960. The original cars weren’t symmetrical – these are. The body panels are pressed in the original way, using a rubber press, one that Aston rents from Eurofighter. But apart from smaller panel gaps, better brake pads, modern racing-seat harnesses, a proper fuel cell and an FIA touring car rollcage, you would be very hard-stretched to spot the difference. Performance is improved by boring the straight-six engine out to 4.7 litres, rather than 3.7, which pushes horsepower up from 314 to maybe as much as 400bhp.