Aston Martin DB5 Single Generation

The DB5's shape belongs almost entirely to Federico Formenti, the Touring of Milan stylist who drew the DB4 in 1958 and simply refined it for 1963: a slightly longer tail, faired-in headlamps, small details tidied, the fundamental proportions untouched because they were already right. What sits under that aluminium skin matters as much as the skin itself. Touring's patented Superleggera method wraps thin aluminium panels over a birdcage of small steel tubes, itself bonded to Harold Beach's new platform chassis, a construction light enough to flatter the performance and, decades later, expensive enough to make electrolytic corrosion between the two metals the single biggest restoration cost on the car. Visual changes from the outgoing DB4 were deliberately modest: fully faired headlamps in place of the DB4's Perspex-covered units, small chrome sill covers, and eventually DB5 badging on the wings and bootlid that the very earliest cars left the factory without. Inside, the painted metal dash and array of Smiths instruments carried over almost unchanged from the DB4, a cabin built around function rather than fashion. It is a design that improved its predecessor by restraint rather than reinvention, and it is hard to find a line on the car that looks wrong six decades later.

The DB5 itself was never developed as a racing car and never ran at Le Mans; that job belonged to the DB4 GT, the GT Zagato, and the works prototypes that used the same engine family. The most direct link is the DP215, John Wyer's one-off 1963 Le Mans prototype designed by Ted Cutting and powered by a race-tuned, twin-plug, fuel-injected version of Tadek Marek's new four-litre six, the same displacement that had just gone into the road-going DB5. Phil Hill put DP215 briefly into the race lead and was clocked at 198.6mph down the Mulsanne Straight in practice, an Aston Martin speed record at the circuit that stood for decades, before a transmission failure, blamed on the extra torque of the bigger engine, ended the run. Aston Martin's own competition department was winding down by 1963, having taken the World Sportscar Championship with the DBR1 in 1959, so the DB5 arrived into a marque already stepping back from the works racing that built its reputation. What it inherited instead was the engineering: an engine proven, in far more aggressive tune, capable of running at the front of the world's hardest race.

No car has ever been more thoroughly claimed by a single film franchise. Aston Martin initially turned down EON Productions when Goldfinger was in preparation, then relented and supplied a surplus four-speed prototype, DP216/1, fitted with Ken Adam's gadgets and resprayed Silver Birch as the Effects Car, plus a standard five-speed production car for the driving scenes. Sean Connery's Bond drove it over the Furka Pass in Switzerland in a sequence as fixed in car-mad memory as the Miura's title-sequence run in The Italian Job a few years later. Goldfinger's success brought the DB5 back for Thunderball the following year, and decades on it has returned for GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die, the only constant across six different actors playing Bond. The car had celebrity owners entirely on its own merits too: Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Mick Jagger and Peter Sellers all had one new in period. But it is the Bond connection that moved the market, not just the culture. When No Time to Die opened in cinemas, one UK Aston Martin specialist reported four or five DB5 inquiries a week, sixty years after the car went out of production.

Body style and engine option are the two axes that matter. The Saloon, badged Sports Saloon in period, is the volume car: 887 built with the standard triple-SU 282bhp engine and, from September 1964, the option of the Vantage engine, triple Weber 45DCOEs and a claimed 314bhp, fitted to roughly 60 saloons from new. The Convertible followed the Saloon into production and stayed rare throughout, 123 built including perhaps eight Vantage-engined cars. Rarest of all is the Shooting Brake: just 12, each one built as a complete Saloon first and then reworked from the A-pillars back by Harold Radford of Hammersmith, commissioned originally so David Brown himself had somewhere to put his polo gear. One shooting brake, chassis 1567/L, carries a genuinely unique specification, a 4-litre twin-plug GT engine related to the DB4 GT's competition unit rather than the standard road car's. Grail hunters chase the Vantage Convertible above everything else roadgoing, perhaps eight built, though the true one-off remains that single GT-engined Shooting Brake. Whatever the variant, a five-speed ZF gearbox is the common spec; the four-speed and automatic cars are curiosities worth knowing about rather than worth paying a premium for.

The honest news is that a DB5's problems are almost all structural and almost all invisible until you go looking. The aluminium body doesn't rust, but the steel understructure beneath it, sills, floor, the pillars around the windscreen and doors, does, and wherever that steel meets the aluminium skin electrolytic corrosion sets in quietly over decades. Bubbling paint is usually the first visible sign, and by the time you see it the damage underneath is typically further along than it looks. The engine block is fundamentally strong and can usually be retained through a rebuild, though corrosion attacks the aluminium internals over time and it's common for a restoration to bore the original block out to 4.2 litres for more power and torque along the way. Wiring looms and the original SU fuel pumps are age items on any unrestored car. None of this is a reason to stay away. A DB5 that has already been through a proper structural restoration, and there is a well-established circle of UK specialists who do this work to a very high standard, is a genuinely usable, reliable classic. The car that hasn't been through that process yet is the one to budget carefully for before you buy.