ASTON MARTIN ZAGATO
This DB4 GT Zagato is the most celebrated of all heyday Aston Martins. Now it could become the most valuable British car ever sold at auction in Europe
On track in 2 VEV, most celebrated of all the heyday Aston Martins… 118
Speculation says £15 million. Bonhams’ more guarded auction estimate is ‘in excess of £10m’. It is impossible for these figures not to colour what I’m doing, even if I’m trying to rein the chromatic onslaught back to a mere tint. Instead, the scene takes on an aura of unreality.
I’m feeling a strong sense of externalisation, of detachment. Am I really here? Are those my hands and feet? Is this actually me, driving at Goodwood in 2 VEV, likely to be the most valuable British car ever to be sold at a European auction? Well, I’d better stop watching the mental video, because I’m in it and I need to direct it.
Lurking deep within the pores of its steering could well be small DNA sequences from Jim Clark, 2 VEV’s most famous driver. It seems almost sacrilegious to add some from my own hands, but there we are. We’ve carried out the action photography, and now the track is clear. It’s just me and 2 VEV.
‘I’ll be quick, I promise,’ I tell the Bonhams people, mindful of their need for more promotional filming in the afternoon, ‘but don’t worry, not too quick.’ After the first of those unhindered laps, I think, should I come in? Have I done enough now for the job in hand? Are further laps worth the risk? What if something breaks? But then, when will I have another chance like this?
So I set out again. And it’s such a friendly, eager machine at my (relatively – this was a race car, after all) gentle pace. Yet it seems that it was less benign when pushed to its extremes, as even the supernaturally gifted Clark discovered.
2 VEV is the best-known Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato. It’s in famous photographs taken at the 1962 Goodwood TT, one showing Clark drifting at a remarkable angle while in fourth place, another of it stuffed into the bank at Madgwick, the long, fast bend after the pit straight with a bump between the two apexes, John Surtees’ leading-up-to-that-point Ferrari 250 GTO buried in the Aston’s right flank. Both cars were mended, of course, which isn’t quite what happened to 2 VEV after those numberplates were scuffed the first time.
Doug Nye’s accompanying story sets out 2 VEV’s complex history, from its manufacture in 1961 and delivery to John Ogier’s Essex Racing Stable, which registered it on 19 May 1961 with sister Zagato 1 VEV, to the present day. Suffice it to say at this point that the car you see here today, as crashed by Clark, crashed again in the 1990s and then restored by the factory to lightly patinated perfection, isn’t quite the car that first arrived in Essex.
That 2 VEV won its race at the British GP meeting at Aintree in the hands of Australian Lex Davison, snatching the lead from Jack Sears’ Coombs E-type on the last lap. It was raced by Clark to fourth place in the 1961 TT, trailing third-place Roy Salvadori in 1 VEV, and was then lent to Equipe National Belge for Lucien Bianchi for a race at Spa in 1962. He crashed out of the lead and 2 VEV was totalled, fortunately without much damage to Bianchi.
Around this time, Aston Martin was preparing to build three of what we might nowadays call ‘evo’ Zagatos, the Project MP209 lightweight cars with a lower nose and broader rear wings that lacked the thick swages on the wheelarch lips. Two were duly given chassis numbers 0191 and 0193, but 0192 remained unused because the car that was presumably intended for that number instead found itself stamped with the 0183 number of 2 VEV. Thus was new-car purchase tax avoided; instead it was, in effect, just a very comprehensive repair, one in which only the battery, now long gone, was re-used in 2 VEV’s reincarnation as an MP209.
The records say that 19 Zagato-bodied DB4 GTs were built in-period (there have been Sanction II and Sanction III cars in later years), although one of them – 2 VEV – has been built twice. So that makes 20, really, the first of them shown at London’s Earls Court motor show in October 1960. There it was a sensation, glassier and more windcheating than the already rather beautiful DB4 GT as revealed a year earlier, and demonstrating well the talent of 23-year-old Ercole Spada, Zagato’s new designer, whose first design this was. It reportedly took him just a week to create. What a way to start what turned out to be an extraordinary career.
‘It’s such a friendly machine at gentle pace. Seems it was less benign when pushed to extremes’
‘2 VEV’s monstrous torque and absence of mass are goading me towards the 152.3mph recorded in 1962 by Autocar’