The Speedback GT rekindles the spirit of James Bond’s
Aston Martin DB5 with a very modern twist.
I am reminded, sitting in the leathery snug of the David
Brown Speedback GT, of a story from my childhood. In the late 18th century,
William Beckford was ‘the richest commoner in Britain’ and built in Wiltshire
Fonthill Abbey, a vast, grandiose Gothic–revival cathedral and home which fell
down around his ears, nearly ruining him.
Digital tech and
craft-man-ship combine for cabin
But with the road to St Tropez stretching out in front of me
(admittedly from the rather unglamorous starting point of the A4421 near
Bicester, Oxford shire), it seems unlikely that David Brown will end up in
penury at the end of his own project. He has much of the vision, daring, drive
and possibly foolhardiness that makes men of means attempt follies more
conservative-thinking people could never conceive of trying.
David Brown
Speedback GT 2014
And yet, just 16 months after he started working on this
long-held dream, I am sitting in a Speedback GT thinking it’s a proper car, by
god, albeit a staggeringly expensive one, at half-a million quid plus whatever
the local taxman adds on, with more than $4.15million already spent from
private funding during development.
Brown, clearly not short of a few bob having run the
family’s heavy-plant engineering firm and sold out to Caterpillar, is an
inveterate tinkerer, a car lover and a perfectionist with a fierce pride in
British engineering.
What he wanted to create was a grand tourer that channelled
the brio of an age where a chap might speed to the Côte d’Azur for a liaison
with a stylish ingénue, without the ignominy of sitting in a pool of oil on the
autoroute. The latest engineering allied to the romance of a bygone age.
The same people
who do Jag’s bespoke stuff do this
So there’s a tension between nostalgia and modernity in the
car that is hard to balance. Too much of the former and you end up with a replica,
too much of the latter and the spirit is lost. So has he achieved it? Well, in
part, yes. Certainly, as we drive around Oxfordshire, it’s a car that makes
people smile and come over to chat, because they instinctively understand the
shape of it and the mood it is trying to evoke.
The view from behind the steering wheel is one you’ve always
known in your mind: the soft curves of the outer wings and wide sweeps of the
bonnet are straight out of the Aston Martin back catalogue. All it needs now is
to be pointing at a slightly scratchy fi lm reel of an Alpine mountain pass
being driven and you could be in almost any TV or fi lm of the 1960s.
Beneath the veneer of vintage is a more contemporary tale
though. One of the reasons it is so fast to market is because underpinning the
hand-built body is a Jaguar XKR Convertible. It seems profligate to take an
angle grinder to a new car, but Brown says this was the best way to produce a
car with the inherent quality needed.
