The Name is Martin, Aston Martin
By Dan Neil-- October 2002, Worth Magazine
How Britain's most famous spy saved its raciest car company

    When Sean Connery drove an Aston Martin DB5 in the 1964 James Bond thriller Goldfinger, it was one of the most important product placements in the history of cinema. Aston Martin's obscurity before Bond would be hard to overstate: Yes, in 1959 an Aston Martin DBR1 had won the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the World Sports Car Championship, but otherwise the little company remained the eyes-only secret of racing cognoscenti and motoring gourmets. In 50 years, Aston Martin had produced only a few hundred cars while being repeatedly foreclosed, moved, pawned, and sold off. Like Bond, Aston Martin lived dangerously.

    Then came Goldfinger, a product endorsement from the coolest guy on the planet. "What the first Bond movie did was a phenomenon," says Roger Stowers, Aston Martin's white-haired company historian. "Absolutely unique. In one week we became one of the most famous motorcar companies in the world."

    Bond had the perfect image - the consummate connoisseur, the ur-consumer - for Aston Martin. Back when high-end shopping in America meant J.C. Penney, Bond liked his shirts Turnbull & Asser, his watches Omega, and his Dom Perignon 1953 - served at no more than 38 degrees Fahrenheit.

    Aston Martin had the perfect image for Bond, too. It was powerful and available in very small numbers, a sort of grand cru British sports car. "In those days, there was a choice for people of a certain temperament," says Los Angeles architect Dan Rhodes, 50, who sold all his worldly belongings in college to travel to England in search of his first Aston Martin. "You could buy a Ferrari or you could buy an Aston Martin, which had a little more creature comfort, was built a little better, and was a little more understated. It was very British. To own one was like belonging to a very exclusive club. And it was a car that could be modified. Aston Martin was like a good English tailor, very accommodating."

    If anyone winced to see Pierce Brosnan climbing into a BMW, as he did in the last three Bond pictures (GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, and The World Is Not Enough), it was because BMW is neither British nor particularly exclusive. It was as if Bond had entered the Monte Carlo casino wearing an After Six tuxedo.

    This Thanksgiving, the world will be set to rights again. In Die Another Day, Bond will be reunited with an Aston Martin: a big, brawny bulldog of a sports car called, with marvelous British triumphalism, the Vanquish. It's new, it has a 12-cylinder, 460-horsepower engine, and it carries a base price of $228,000. Lasers are optional.

    Bond's endorsement is at least as important this time around, since it coincides with the company's rebirth. Aston Martin Lagonda, after a somewhat fallow decade of Ford ownership, has embarked on a daring master plan that calls for an increase in production to 5,000 cars by 2005 (up from 1,000 cars in 2000) and the introduction of a third model, a "smaller, more tailored" Aston Martin code-named the AM305 (to cost about $115,000).

    To accommodate the three-car line (Vanquish, DB7, AM305), Aston Martin will more than double the number of its dealerships worldwide, to 140, expanding into Asia and the Middle East. In the United States, 14 new dealerships will be created, for a total of 40. Showrooms such as the one that opened this year just off the Champs Élysées will be hip, cool environments of pale travertine, plasma screens, chrome, and glass. Out with the English drawing room, in with the Prada superstore. The stiff-necked and stuffy old brand is about to become Rodeo Drive couture and a volume player against the likes of Ferrari (whose annual production is 4,000 cars) and Maserati (2,500 cars).

    The catalyst of this ambitious plan is Ulrich Bez, who became CEO of Aston Martin two years ago. Bez, 59, a native of Stuttgart, Germany, is a veteran of the sports car wars. He worked as a senior project engineer at Porsche, developing the 911 Turbo and the 968 as well as overseeing the company's efforts in Formula One and Le Mans-style racing. Bez then moved to BMW in 1980, where he headed the BMW M-Technik performance division and worked closely with Wolfgang Reitzle, the company's number-two manager and one of the most sought-after executives in the car business.

    In 1994, Bez moved on to South Korea's Daewoo, where he was head of design, development, and engineering. Meanwhile, in 1999, Reitzle was recruited by Ford's then-chairman Jacques Nasser to head the new Premier Automotive Group (PAG), a London-based consortium of Ford's luxury brands that now includes Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Volvo. In 2000, Bez left Daewoo to become a consultant to Ford on a possible purchase of the Korean company. That same year, Aston Martin CEO Bob Dover left to take the reins at the newly acquired Land Rover, and Reitzle recommended Bez for the top spot at Aston Martin. In July 2000, he got the job.

    By then a properly seasoned auto executive with salt-and-pepper hair and weathered good looks, Bez could hardly believe his luck. "This is the best job in the car business," he says. "It's a dream to have an opportunity to work with such a brand."

    I meet Bez at England's Millbrook Proving Grounds, near London. He's still trembling from an hour-long session in the 1959 Le Mans-winning DBR1 race car, a fast and deadly piece of vintage machinery requiring honest-to-God talent to drive. It's one of those somebody's-got-to-do-it moments: "It's part of my job," Bez says, smoothing out his helmet hair. "With a company like Aston Martin, you really have to drive the cars. The data doesn't describe the emotion, the soul, of the Aston Martin."

    Bez's romantic streak is balanced by a tough, decisive rationality and a distinct lack of fear. "I told [the Ford board of directors] they had two options," Bez recalls. "They could either get rid of Aston Martin or they could fully support the strategy for its future." He has promised the board that the company will return a profit to Ford by 2005. (Aston Martin won't quote figures, but it is estimated that Bez's reinvention of the company will cost around $500 million.) More recently, Bez has floated the idea of taking the company public in 2005, much as Ferrari did in the 1990s under the aegis of Fiat - although he quickly qualifies that by saying it would be more a measure of how well the company is doing than a hard-and-fast goal.

    A lot has changed at Ford since Bez got his job. Nasser was ousted in October 2001, and William Clay Ford Jr., the great-grandson of founder Henry Ford, took over as CEO. Reitzle quit last spring after reportedly clashing with management over costs and consolidations within PAG. Overall, Ford lost $5.5 billion in 2001, the calamitous "Year of Firestone." Reitzle's replacement, former Mazda president Mark Fields, is expected to bring PAG into a more corporate orbit and to place more emphasis on cost containment than on engineering autonomy.

    While the rest of PAG has been put on an austerity program, Aston Martin's plans are proceeding unchanged (largely, it seems, on the strength of Bez's credibility). Those plans include building all future Aston Martin models on unique platforms, as opposed to modifying a common Ford platform only as much as necessary. (The current DB7 model is based chiefly on the Jaguar XK platform.) Platform sharing saves money but tends to dim the luster of luxury brands; to devotees of Aston Martin, it's downright unseemly.

    Future Aston Martins will rely heavily on Ford's parts shelf and supplier network, however, sharing components such as steering racks, brake cylinders, and climate-control panels with Volvos, Jaguars, and Land Rovers. But when you're selling a car for $228,000, you've got to draw the line somewhere. Bez did just that when he saw the Vanquish prototype and vetoed the taillights, which had been transplanted from the Ford Cougar. The decision held up production but increased Bez's stature within the company. "When Bez did that," historian Stowers says, "we started to believe that, yes, here is someone who understands."

    Meanwhile, to prop up the brand's image of hand-tailored exclusivity, Aston Martin will produce a series of limited-edition cars with bespoke halos. In July, the company unveiled the DB7 Zagato (price to be announced), a high-performance version of the DB7 Vantage, in front of Gieves & Hawkes, one of Savile Row's most venerable tailors. (Zagato is the name of the Milan design house that styled the body and was responsible for some of Aston Martin's most famous cars, including the DB4GT and the V-8 Vantage.) The shorter, more athletic-looking DB7 Zagato features aluminum panels hand-hammered over English wheels. This is coach building the old-fashioned way. Act now: Supplies are limited - only 99 Zagatos will be produced.

    And of course Bez is itching to get Aston Martin back into motor sports. "We belong on the track," he says. "Racing could be a tool. We could take advantage of the experience to benefit the new car."

    Spoken like a guy with helmet hair.

BUYING THE BACKSTORY
    The most radical idea Bez brought to Aston Martin was that it had to be profitable as well as prestigious. This has not been the Aston Martin way. In its 88-year history, the company has rarely turned a profit. Founded in 1914 by Robert Bamford and Lionel Martin (Aston came from Aston Clinton Hill, where the pair's cars had seen success in hill-climb races), the firm went into receivership for the first time in 1925. From then on, Aston Martin's history reads like a medieval legend, with white knights riding in every few years to save the day. In 1925, there was Lord Charnwood; in 1932, Sir Arthur Sutherland. The most chivalrous of all was David Brown (the DB in the cars' nomenclature), an engineering industrialist who bought the company in 1947. Soon after, he bought the British sports car company Lagonda and combined it and Aston Martin under one roof: the old Tickford Motor Bodies factory in Newport Pagnell, 60 miles northwest of London, where the cars are still built today. From there, Brown led the company through its glory years, the 1950s and 1960s.

    But Aston Martin, even with Bond in its corner, suffered much the same fate as other British motor companies in the 1960s: Undercapitalized and unwilling to modernize, it declined. In 1975, the company was shuttered for six months. That year a mere 21 cars were cobbled together in the chilly old workshops, and British schoolchildren sent in donations to help save the impoverished icon. "Even the most hard-bitten thought it was the end," Stowers says.

    Then a consortium of North American businessmen bought the company for a little more than £1 million (about $2.3 million at that time), but they didn't manage to keep it long. For the next two decades, the company passed through one set of butterfingers after another. By 1987, the year Henry Ford II initiated the purchase of the company, Aston Martin was running on vapors, with a dwindling client list made up of automotive eccentrics and car-obsessed sheiks and sultans. The company's material assets were negligible.

    The Ford family was well attuned to the mystique of Aston Martin. Ford Motor's manufacturing presence in the United Kingdom goes back to 1911, and Europe is currently the company's second-biggest market, with nearly 2 million vehicle sales (about 10 percent of the market). Henry Ford II was also an incurable Anglophile, and he loved British motorcars, particularly Aston Martins. Yet it would be too much to say that he purchased the company as the first step in building a superluxury portfolio for Ford, much less that he had in mind the grand scheme that PAG would eventually become. In 1987, he was just the latest white knight. "Let's just say it was a business case driven by sentiment," says Simon Sproule, PAG's vice president of communications.

    Ford purchased 75 percent of Aston Martin's stock in 1987, with the remaining 25 percent owned by Victor Gauntlett and the family of shipping magnate Peter Livanos. Gauntlett was retained as executive chairman and chief executive until 1991, when Walter Hayes, a former vice president at Ford Europe, took over those roles. Ford purchased the remaining stock in 1994, and by that time plans were well under way to build the DB7 at Bloxham, a former JaguarSport facility 20 miles north of Oxford. Ford reportedly invested £65 million (about $95 million) to bring the new DB7 to market.

    In fact, Dearborn's timing was good. "Ford guessed right," says Csaba Csere, editor-in-chief of Car and Driver magazine. "As they looked forward, they could see that the superluxury market had room for growth and that the powerful imagery of the brand would be valuable."

Aston's greatest equity lay in the little silver wings, the company emblem. "Ford bought the marque's heritage, its history, its culture," Sproule says. For companies contemplating a leap into the premium luxury market, he says, "you can invent a brand, like Toyota did with Lexus, or you can buy a brand."

    In fact, the past decade has seen one exclusive nameplate after another picked up, brushed off, and set on its feet by the automotive giants. Bentley, Lamborghini, and Bugatti are owned by the VW Group. In 1997 Ferrari purchased the moribund Maserati company and relaunched it as a sister marque, using many of the same suppliers, engine technology, and production and design capacities. By 2005, Ferrari and Fiat will have invested more than $450 million to renovate and enlarge the old factory on Viale Ciro Menotti in Modena, Italy, and production will rise to more than 4,500 cars in 2005.

    If successful, these high-profile takeovers could mean high profits. Ford anticipates that PAG, which will introduce 25 new models in the next five years, will contribute, together with Lincoln Mercury, more than a third of the company's global profits by 2005. (In 2001, PAG accounted for 10 percent of Ford's sales.)

VANQUISHED BY FORD?
The problem with dusting off a grand old nameplate and slapping it on an utterly new car is one of authenticity, according to Miles Collier, one of America's most respected car collectors. "Volkswagen spits out a Bugatti, and it has absolutely nothing to do with a real Bugatti," he scoffs. "They might as well call it a Himmelfarb."

    Aston Martin is not quite in that category, but it is not a bespoke car anymore either. The DB7, rushed into production in 1994, was mechanically a clone of the Jaguar XJS. It was a quick way for the company to create cash flow, and it has been Aston Martin's best-selling car ever, with more than 5,000 units sold. But it has not endeared itself to purists.

    The Vanquish strikes an interesting compromise between automation and tradition. Many of the components, such as the aluminum tub (the core of the car), arrive at the factory preassembled. The alloy body panels, once hand-contoured, are now preformed using exotic hydroforming machines. However, craftsmen still use small hammers to turn and roll the edges. It's an open question whether this peculiar stop on the factory line is about craftsmanship or showmanship. One step that's right out of the past is the paint shop, where every Vanquish is hand-painted with nine coats of mirror-finish lacquer. Such concessions to tradition may not be possible at the new Gaydon factory, near Stratford-upon-Avon, where the AM305 will be built in much larger numbers.

    "We are intensely proud to still be here after all these years," Stowers says. "But we do wish Uncle Henry would spend a little more time and money getting to know what this company is about. Ford has got to realize that it has got ahold of the most individualistic company in the world, and they mustn't, they can't, kick individualism out the door."

    Collier likewise fears a blanding effect. "These days, every car is a good car," he says. "There's this gray paste of excellence covering the market. Character is what distinguishes one product from another. Character implies great virtues and great vices. It's often the idiosyncratic vices that make a great car memorable."

STIRRED, NOT SHAKEN
    All cars have faces. Some smile, some gaze into the distance. Here at the Millbrook Proving Grounds, the Vanquish glares, as if preparing to seek revenge for a slight. Its bared-teeth grille and hooded headlights promise nothing but trouble. Each fender well holds massive 19-inch wheels. The car is silver - not ordinary silver but the living luster of mercury. My critical vocabulary is reduced to Beavis's "Whoa, cool."

    I open the door and step across a chrome plaque on the threshold: "This Aston Martin V-12 Vanquish was hand-built for James Bond by Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd." This is one of the company's show cars. The Vanquish interior contains no wood, only leather, carbon fiber, and aluminum - a purposeful ambience for a serious car.

    I press the red START button on the central console, and there's a hoarse, metallic lash from the Cosworth-built V-12. The needles on the whiteface dials jump; thunder pours from the megaphonic tailpipes. The Vanquish doesn't have a gearshift; instead, it has shift paddles behind the wheel, the right paddle for upshifts, the left for downshifts.

    Soon I am out on the high-bank track. I nail the throttle, and the car nails me to the back of the seat. It's like being shoved by an irate bouncer. I go up through the gears, using the shift paddles to work the clutchless six-speed manual transmission. Soon the car is hanging sideways by its own centrifugal force, rocketing around the track at more than 140 miles per hour - with plenty of pedal to go. By design, the Vanquish is a GT (for gran turismo), happiest in three-digit territory. The wind and motor seem to sing a perfect fifth apart. The car leans into the wind and even seems to tug on the reins a little, as if to ask, "What's the problem? Let's go."

    It's an imposing car, heavy with history and loaded with expectations. As in any good thriller, the outcome of this story is far from certain. Will Ford stick by Aston Martin? And how will this British playboy hold up against its exotic adversaries? Can the third car arrive in time to return a profit to Ford and save Bez from an ignominious fate? You have to buy a ticket to find out.

    Dan Neil is a contributing editor at Car and Driver.

ASTON MARTIN MILESTONES

1914 Lionel Martin and Robert Bamford found Aston Martin in a West London workshop. They take the company's first name from Aston Clinton Hill, near London, then a popular site for amateur auto races.

1928 Aston Martin enters the 24 Hours of Le Mans race for the first time. The company's two cars do not finish, but the team receives a special prize for fielding the fastest 1.5-liter car.

1947 Industrialist David Brown buys Aston Martin and merges it with Lagonda Motorcar Company. His initials become part of Aston Martin model names, including the new, top-of-the-line DB7 Zagato.

1959 The DBR1 takes first and second place at Le Mans, the greatest moment in Aston Martin racing history. In the first-place car is American Carrol Shelby, who will later build the Cobra sports car.

1976 Aston Martin introduces the stiletto-style Lagonda V-8 Saloon. A commercial failure, the car is later seen as a landmark in automotive design for its advanced electronics and performance.

1994 Aston Martin unveils the six-cylinder DB7, the first car produced under Ford ownership. The car uses the Jaguar XJS platform but is refined over the years to reflect its aristocratic heritage.

SCREEN TEST
"We were very sniffy about it," says Roger Stowers, Aston Martin's historian, of the company's initial involvement with the Bond movies. "[Producer Albert] Broccoli wanted us to give them two cars for Goldfinger, but the factory was struggling just to keep up with building a half dozen DB4s a week." David Brown, then owner of Aston Martin, was in New York City at the time and advised the managing director, Steve Heggie, to "do what you think is right." Reluctantly, the factory lent a pair of DB5s and a few boxes of spare parts to Broccoli, who must have been a little disappointed. He'd wanted the DB4 because it was then the most desirable Aston Martin, having a sinuous lightweight body designed by Zagato. "But we didn't have any left," Stowers says.

Almost four decades later, everybody understands that James Bond is Aston Martin's most important customer. In spring 2001, as soon as the Vanquish was ready, CEO Ulrich Bez invited Barbara Broccoli, Albert's widow and the principal of Eon Productions, the producer of Die Another Day, to the factory to see the new car. "I gave Barbara a tour on country roads," he says. "She was really frightened. She was awed by the noise, the performance."

Ford's placement office and Eon hammered out the details: Ford and Aston Martin would provide seven Astons, two of which would not come back alive. In addition, Eon would get eight Jaguar XK8s (two to destroy, four to use in close-up work, and two others for special effects) and several Ford Thunderbirds, the car that Halle Berry drives in the film. According to Bez, no money changed hands. Six weeks before the film debuts (November 22 in the United States), Ford will commence an ad campaign featuring the film and the car. The tag line: "The best of the British."

But there's more here than meets the Golden Eye. The film's opening sequence takes place on the frozen face of the Vatnajökull glacier, in southeast Iceland. The script called for Bond, driving a Vanquish, to be pursued across the ice by an assailant driving a machine-gun-equipped Jaguar XKR. Neither car was exactly Scott Hamilton on the ice, so Eon's special effects crew cut apart both and installed four-wheel drivetrains. Best of the British? Sure. It's Aston Martin with a little Land Rover on the side. - D.N.

BIG WHEELS
The world is about to be overrun by six-figure cars. A partial list includes the Mercedes-Benz Maybach limousine, the 1,000-horsepower Bugatti Veyron, the Porsche Carrera GT, and the reborn Ford GT40. (Cadillac's entry in the field, the Cien, has been shelved.) All of them will dive into the deepest end of the pool to swim with the latest Ferraris, two new Bentleys, two Lamborghinis, two Rolls-Royces, and the Saleen S7, which is built in California. -- D.N.