Romanosky On Aston Martin

Romanosky Automotive Weekly Gazette

Last week I opined about ‘the best car in the world’ as a class of collector cars. By nature usable and practical, and as such a sales success; values of these mostly four-door vehicles are kept at fractions of their two-seat cousins.

But sometimes what you want doesn’t make a lot of sense. For instance, I don’t recall any motoring journalist ever referring to Aston Martin as ‘The Best Car In The World’, except for perhaps ‘Best Movie Car’. Astons are beautiful and can be deeply satisfying - and those are two pretty good reasons to get one. You may face a dissenting opinion from your accountant - Aston Martin and profit are rarely mentioned in the same sentence.

In 1947, after David Brown answered a classified ad in the London Times for a "High Class Motor Business", and paid a reported GBP 20,000, he owned a company that had been making sporting machinery since 1913. The first car was entered in hillclimbs and trails and was a competitor to Bugatti. It had an Isotta Fraschini chassis, a 1300cc 4 cylinder side-valve Coventry Simplex engine and a four-speed gearbox. The name comes from co-founder Lionel Martin and the Aston Clinton Hill Climb.

In the 1920’s Aston developed a twin-cam engine and raced the car successfully in Europe and broke several endurance records. It averaged 76.2 mph over 16.5 hours which was outstanding for the day. In the 1930’s Aston Martin came away with several class wins at Le Mans (above) and held distance records that stood until 1950.

When David Brown purchased the company it was in need of a suitable engine. Bentley had been bought out by Rolls Royce in 1931, and after WO Bentley’s 3-year term working for the new company, he started working for Lagonda where he developed a 2.6 Litre twin-cam straight six. Brown bought the Lagonda company to obtain the engine, with which he developed his first car - the DB2. The DB2 came 1st and 2nd in their class at Le Mans in 1950 (above), and Aston Martin won the race outright with Carol Shelby and Roy Salvadori driving the DBR1 in 1959. The Mk. III was the last version of the DB 2 series that was produced until 1959. It was the car that Bond drove in Ian Flemming’s novels - though when the movies came out the new model was the DB5. The last version of the engine was re-worked by Tadek Marek, bored out to 2.9 Litres and produced a healthy 178hp with dual exhaust.

Even the promise that an Aston Martin one day might be beautiful and satisfying was good enough for me, when I took over my friend Rob’s 1958 DB Mark III Coupe restoration project. It was mostly in boxes, which was the only way I could afford one.

I talk about an easy restoration being about 500 hours and an average one about 1,000 hours. This Aston was about 2,000 hours. At the time a nice DB 2/4 Mk III was about $250,000, which is why Rob sold it to me - the restoration would have come in at $350k+. For me, I just thought I would plug away at it, and then maybe one day have a driver.

above: When you take a car apart you realize just how many parts there are!

below: Tadek Marek reworked the original WO Bentley 2.6 Litre Lagonda engine to 2.9L and 178hp.

below: Aston Mk III, rear body work removed, sharing space with a 7.0Litre Iso Grifo

It was a daunting project. Rob had got the project started, and found a guy who looked like he could do it but was having some health problems. He started with polishing the valve covers - which had the most favourable ratio between work and gratification. Not a good sign - I like to start with the hard stuff first. The biggest problems were that the engine had a crack in the block, and the car had been hit hard in the front end. The engine was disassembled. A previous owner had attempted to repair the body but gave up.

I took the engine to a machine shop who said that they could repair it. They had it for a year and just walked around it - I pulled the job. They were busy, and prioritized the straight forward work first, which means they never got to the Aston block. Next I visited Kevin Kay, who is to Aston Martin what Rudi Koniczek is to Gullwings and Bruce Canepa is to Porsche. I made a detour to his facility in Redding Washington, coming back from Monterey one year. He said all the blocks crack there and unless I was racing it to leave it alone! The WO design had very sturdy full-length chrome plated cylinder liners that provided adequate rigidity. He also said that I should consider getting rid of the David Brown gearbox and put a Tremac in it as it transformed the performance of the car and was a simple bolt-in installation. Jay Leno puts Tremacs in many of his cars too, along with Wilwood brakes. Kay was very nice and I regret not having $400k to give him to finish the project for me.

The Aston's aluminium bonnet was remade from scratch - the skills to do this are not very easy to find

At the time I had invested in a small metal restoration shop. A guy from Ontario came to see me and had been working at RM Restorations for Rob Meyers and had worked on several Pebble Beach winning cars. We made a deal where he would restore the body of the Aston and I would pay for the shop for a year. We got most of the way through it, but it fell apart. We had this Aston, an early 356 Coupe and an Iso Grifo, all of which needed 1,000 hour body restorations. I structured everything based around completing 2,000 hours per year of work, but we never got anywhere close to that. The work got behind schedule, and not being able to operate a power hammer there was little that I could do about it. I pulled out and left some money behind. A guy from Denmark bought the car with all the hardest parts done. I wish I could have pulled it off, but Sarah and I were just starting a family and it was taking up too much of my time, so I didn't get to finish it.

Above: Sarah and Lawrence in Field, BC in the 1976 AM V8

I did find a restored Aston on eBay though. A guy in Winnipeg had just spent $100k on a cosmetic restoration on a 1976 V8 Coupe, and wanted out of it to buy a Ferrari. The Buy It Now was $40,000 which was cheap, even for 2010 values. I talked to the guy at length about the car, had visions of George Lazenby dancing in my head, and pressed the button. I don’t think many of the guys watching the auction expected it to end early with a BIN. Most auctions stay up for the duration and then, on eBay at least, get decided in the final seconds. The guy was flooded with offers after I bought it but he honoured his commitment to me. After I took delivery I got a bunch of offers too. I remember one guy getting mad because I wouldn’t sell the car to him for $45k

The car looked absolutely fantastic; both on the outside and in the engine bay. But didn’t go as well as it looked. The Chrysler three speed Torqueflight gearbox never made the car feel as fast as the quad-cam 5.3 litre engine looked like it should have. It was also the most hilariously fuel inefficient vehicle I’ve ever driven. It had four Weber twin-choke carburetors and would spray about one litre of fuel out the tail pipes when you started it. The 100L tank wouldn’t get you any further than a few hundred km. I couldn’t go to Banff and back without refuelling! The brochure listed the power at 310hp and performance of 0-60mph in under 6 seconds and a top speed of 160mph - but not with the automatic!

It also had a gas smell. And it had a couple of small fires. Not the best combination. We were driving out to Lake Louise and the air conditioning compressor (Delco) seized and started smoking. I pulled over and cut the belt off. Then on the way home the fuse box started smoking which was unfortunate as it sat right above Sarah’s lap, under the dash. After that she didn’t want to go out in it anymore. Lucas aside, the wiring of 70's British cars really lets them down. My 1973 E-Type was the same: the wires are routed haphazardly and they get really brittle with age - a recipe for disaster.

1976 wasn’t a stellar year for build quality in the UK, and the 1970’s in general were challenging, especially for low volume manufacturers. On one of the period brochures I have for the car, it lists the distributor as the Trustee in Bankruptcy! Aston Martin must have some sort of record for consecutive losses. I think the various corporate entities that have manufactured cars by the name Aston Martin have only made a profit a handful of times since 1913! It is now majority owned by the Canadian Lawrence Stroll, who at least has deep pockets. We'll see if their new SUV can sell in sufficient numbers to make the company viable.

I had mostly taken Aston Martin off my radar until I just saw the latest Bond movie, ‘No Time To Die’, which features a splendid V8 Coupe, a couple of model years away from the one I had, and in the same colour. Well, it may not make any sense, but I wish I had it back!

Top: Romanosky and his 1976 AM V8

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