In the spring of 1993, the loudest thing at the Geneva Motor Show was the silence. When the cover came off the green car on the Aston Martin stand, a crowd that had seen everything the industry could offer stopped talking and leaned in. A young television presenter named Jeremy Clarkson lowered himself into the driver’s seat and quietly called it stunning. By the end of the day, the car would be named the star of the show.
The car was called the DB7, and it was the most beautiful thing Aston Martin had built in forty years. What almost none of the people pressed three deep around the stand knew was that this gorgeous shape was sitting on the floor pan of a Jaguar, a design whose bones dated back to 1975. Its tail lights had come from a Mazda 323. Its door mirrors had come from a Citroën CX.
Its cabin switches had been lifted from ordinary Ford saloons. The DB7 was not a thoroughbred bred in a Buckinghamshire stable. It was a rescue mission wearing an evening gown. It needed to be.
In the entire year before that morning in Geneva, Aston Martin had built just 46 cars. A third of its workforce had been sent home with pay because there was no work left for them to do. Its American parent, Ford, was losing money and had all but signed the company’s death warrant. This was not a new situation for Aston Martin.
The company had gone bankrupt seven times since its founding, and each time someone who loved it too much had pulled it back from the edge. But this time, there was no white knight waiting in the wings. There was only Ford, and Ford wanted out. The story began in 1913, when Lionel Martin and Robert Bamford set up a small business in London selling and servicing cars.
Martin loved to race up Aston Hill near the village of Aston Clinton, and when the time came to name the cars he dreamed of building, he married the hill to his own surname. The first car to carry the name was registered in March 1915, and almost immediately the world got in the way. The First World War swallowed everything, and by 1925, Bamford and Martin went bankrupt. It was hauled out of the fire by a consortium that included engineer Augustus Bertelli, whose fine little sports machines carried the name into the 1930s with great credit—and still the company could not make the sums add up.
Saving Aston Martin was a recurring chore for all its owners. Making money from it was optional. In 1947, the man who answered that recurring call was David Brown, a Yorkshire industrialist who made gears and tractors. He bought the entire company for £20,500 and stamped his initials on the results: DB.
His cars won at Le Mans in 1959 and took the world sports car championship that same season. And in 1964, a silver DB5 appeared in Goldfinger, turning Aston Martin overnight into the most famous car in the world. For a while, it looked as though the company had finally outrun its own history. But beneath the glamour, the same old truth was grinding quietly away.
By the early 1970s, with British industry sliding into strikes and shortages, the wounds had become too many to staunch. In 1972, David Brown sold the company for a nominal sum, and the carousel of owners began again. In September 1987, Ford bought 75% of Aston Martin. For the first time in its precarious life, the company had a parent with genuinely bottomless pockets.
It very nearly became the moment the dying was finished off altogether. The factory at Newport Pagnell built cars the way they had been built for thirty years—by hand. A single Aston Martin V8 took roughly twelve weeks to build. The engine alone took a skilled man about 56 hours to assemble.
The cars were glorious anachronisms, small masterpieces and small disasters at precisely the same time. And the men in Dearborn, Michigan, who now owned them, looked at the numbers through cold eyes. They saw a workshop hand-carving fabulously expensive cars that almost nobody was buying. When the recession broke over Britain at the turn of the decade, it broke over Aston Martin the way a hammer breaks over glass.
The company built 193 cars in 1988, 208 in 1989, 201 in 1990, 168 in 1991, with a loss of £6. 5 million. And then in 1992, the number fell clean off the edge of the world: 46 cars in a whole year. A third of the workforce sat at home.
Nick Fry, the new operations director, walked into the factory that year and found a business barely clinging to life. They were, in his own blunt words, really, really at death’s door. Senior men in Detroit didn’t even know their own company owned Aston Martin, and at least one reportedly kept calling it Austin Martin, as though it were a make of washing machine. In November 1992, a memo traveled from the chairman of Aston Martin to Bill Ford.
Its author was Walter Hayes, a former Fleet Street newspaper man who had come out of retirement to decide what to do with the dying mark. He was now convinced that Aston Martin’s death warrant had been signed. And then he asked a question that hung in the air over the whole desperate enterprise: Could they not contemplate some fate less than death? Hayes had spent his life with words, not cars, but he understood better than almost anyone alive how a story took hold of the public imagination and how a great name once made could be worth more than any factory full of machines.
He had persuaded Ford to back the Cosworth DFV, the racing engine that won 154 Grand Prix. He knew that Aston Martin could not be saved by building yet another £80,000 V8 by hand. What the company needed was a genuinely new car, faster to build, priced a rung or two below the top of the market, a car that could sell not in dozens but in hundreds. There was only one problem: Aston Martin had no money to design such a car.
So Hayes cast himself, only half joking, in the role of the Scrounger from The Great Escape—a man who gets what he needs not by manufacturing it, but by knowing where it already exists and talking his way to it. The answer was sitting inside another company Ford happened to own. Jaguar had spent the better part of a decade developing a replacement for its aging XJS, a car known internally as the XJ41. It had become too heavy, too complicated, and hopelessly over budget, so around 1990, Ford killed it stone dead.
But a man named Tom Walkinshaw, a racing driver turned engineering entrepreneur, looked at the corpse and did not see a failure. He saw an opportunity that somebody else had already paid for. He draped a beautiful new body over the perfectly good XJS floor pan, powered it with a tuned Jaguar six-cylinder engine, and offered it to Jaguar. Jaguar said no.
The reason was as old as corporate pride itself: not invented here. Walkinshaw was left holding a nearly finished sports car that its intended maker didn’t want. Walter Hayes was in urgent need of a car he couldn’t afford to build. The orphaned Jaguar was quietly adopted by Aston Martin, and the rejected coupe from Coventry began to become the most important Aston Martin in history.
For the transformation, Walkinshaw turned to a young designer in his own studio almost nobody had heard of: a 38-year-old Scot named Ian Callum. Callum understood the assignment perfectly, because Walkinshaw had made it brutally simple: the car had to look great. The looks would sell it. Callum took the Jaguar-descended shape and pushed and pulled and reproportioned it, drawing on the ghosts of the classic David Brown cars—the long bonnet, the delicate grille, the hunches.
Line by line, the Jaguar receded and the Aston Martin emerged. He did it, by his own admission, half out of his mind with fear. Then came the truly audacious part. Hayes and Walkinshaw’s engineers went shopping through the enormous parts bins of the Ford empire.
The tail lights came from a Mazda 323F. The door mirrors came from a Citroën CX. The cabin switches came from humble Ford saloons. The whole project reportedly cost around $30 million to bring to life—not a budget, but a rounding error.
For the engine, TWWR took Jaguar’s aluminium straight-six, strapped an intercooled supercharger to it, and got around 335 brake horsepower. And then Hayes did the one thing that turned a clever confection into a true Aston Martin. He went to see Sir David Brown and asked his blessing to revive the DB name. Brown gave it.
The new car would be the DB7, the first Aston in a generation to carry the letters of its golden age. Sir David Brown died in September 1993, having lived to see his initials returned to the front of a motorcar. You could not build the DB7 at Newport Pagnell. There was simply no room.
But out at W’’a Mill in the Oxfordshire village of Bloxham stood a modern factory built to produce the Jaguar XJ220 supercar, and it was going spare. Aston Martin took it over. Bloxham would build cars with steel monocoque bodies—a first in the mark’s history. The steel bodies were pressed in Coventry, painted at the Rolls-Royce works in Crewe, then assembled at Bloxham on a line laid out to turn out around fifteen cars a week.
The transformation fell largely to Nick Fry, who cleared nearly sixty tons of old material out of the place in a single weekend and moved the engineering office down to the end of the production line so the men who designed the car and the men who built it were for once in the same room. When Ford’s board first approved Hayes’s scheme, it had agreed to pay for development of the car—but not to put it into production. That final commitment still hung in the balance when the cover came off at Geneva in March 1993. Faced with the car the world’s press had just voted the star of the entire show, Ford green-lit production.
The applause in Switzerland unlocked the factory in Oxfordshire. The DB7 went on sale in 1994 at £78,500—thousands less than the handbuilt V8s that had nearly killed the company. In 1995, Bloxham built more than 700 cars, more than Aston Martin had managed across the whole miserable stretch that ended in near death. The workers who had been sent home were called back.
By the time production finally ended, close to 7,000 DB7s had been built across a decade, outselling all the previous DB models put together. In 1999, Aston unveiled the DB7 V12 Vantage, the first production twelve-cylinder engine in the mark’s history, giving the car the beating heart its beauty had always deserved. The DB7 did not merely save Aston Martin. It bought the company a future.
In 2003, it was replaced by the DB9, the first Aston Martin built at Gaydon, the company’s first purpose-built factory, and the first car on a new aluminium architecture that would underpin nearly every Aston Martin for well over a decade. But the formula the DB9 followed—one beautiful front-engined grand tourer carrying the DB name and the weight of the whole company on its shoulders—was precisely the formula the DB7 had proven could work. That template still defines Aston Martin to this day. Walter Hayes never got to drive the first DB7 off the line.
He stepped down in February 1994, before the work ran late past his retirement date, and he died in the year 2000. He was made a life president of the company he had saved. There is a better monument to him, though. It has wings on it, and it is still today on the front of every car the company builds.
Aston Martin has died seven times and been buried seven times, and each time someone who loved it too much has coaxed it back to its feet. But of all those resurrections, one stands apart. It happened because a retired newspaper man would not accept the obvious, and a racing driver had a car nobody wanted, and a frightened young designer was handed the whole future of a legend and told simply to make it beautiful. They had almost no money and almost no time, and a Jaguar that Jaguar had thrown away.
It was more than enough.