Market News
007’s Bigfoot Defender expected to fetch up to £ 250,000 at auction
007’s Bigfoot Defender is going up for auction and it’s expected to fetch a quarter of a million pounds
SPECIAL AGENT James Bond’s cars have always fetched a premium. The most famous 007 wheels of all time, the Aston Martin DB5 driven by Sean Connery, fetched almost £3 million when it was sold in October 2010. So it should come as no surprise that auctioneers Bonhams expected the Bigfoot Defender from the MI6 secret agent’s 2015 movie Spectre to fetch £250,000 when it went under the hammer at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. After all, it’s not every day you get the chance to own a Land Rover from a Bond film.
The DB5 first appeared in Bond’s second film, Goldfinger (1964) and featured an impressive list of extras, including front-firing rockets, machine
Sguns, hood-mounted target-seeking shotguns, spike-producing tyres and an ejector seat for troublesome passengers. But the 2014 Defender SVX is no less impressive, having been modified and upgraded by Jaguar Land Rover Special Vehicle Operations. Included in the modifications are giant 37-inch diameter all-terrain tyres, which gives the car its nickname Bigfoot.
The suspension is a Bowler racing setup, which incorporates rose joints and Bilstein rally dampers. Engine-wise, the TDCI has been remapped to boost power from 120 bhp to 185 bhp, producing a massive 368 lb-ft of torque.
Inside, the passenger gets a much better deal than in the Aston Martin. Instead of an ejector seat, there are comfortable Recaro seats with four-point harnesses, and a full roll cage.
The vehicle is one of ten produced for the film and it is clear that it isn’t just a gimmicky movie car, but boasts some serious muscle, on- or off-road. And while its nine siblings were mainly used for marketing and publicity purposes, this one was actually used in the stunts in the film, as scars on the bonnet and functioning hydraulic handbrake show.
Bond aficionados will know that Bigfoot was used by the main henchman Mr. Hinx (played by Dave Bautista) and a team of Spectre mercenaries to capture and kidnap Bond’s love interest, Dr. Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux).
A vast array of cars from many manufacturers have appeared in the 25 Bond films. The very first was a 105E Ford Anglia in Dr No, in 1962. In that film, Bond (played by Sean Connery) drove a pre-war Bentley 4.5-litre Mark IV, making it the most authentic car to feature in any of the 007 films. Why? Because that’s what he drove in the original James Bond books, written by Ian Fleming.
Fleming, himself a former spy who worked for British Naval Intelligence during the second world war, wrote a total of 11 Bond novels and two collections of short stories. Although the cars in his Bond novels didn’t have the gadgets of the cars in the movies, none of them could compete with Fleming’s other famous literary creation – Chitty-chittyBang-bang, the car that could fly.