Aston Martin DB6

Touring of Milan assumed it would get the contract to replace the DB5, the body it had drawn in the first place, and its finances badly needed the work. Aston Martin said no. Wind tunnel testing on a development car, registered 4 YMC, had found the DB5 shape prone to aerodynamic lift, and the fix Aston's own engineers landed on was a Kamm tail, the abrupt, chopped off rear end pioneered by aerodynamicist Wunibald Kamm and already used on Aston's sports racing prototypes. The result is unmistakably still a DB5 from the windscreen forward and something else entirely behind it: a raised roofline for rear headroom, a steeper screen, split front and rear bumpers, an oil cooler intake low in the nose, and quarter windows that had not featured on an Aston since the DB2. Underneath, the tubular Superleggera construction Touring licensed to Aston was quietly replaced with folded steel box sections, stronger and barely heavier despite the longer body. Aston kept paying Touring's five pound per car Superleggera royalty anyway, and every DB6 still wears the badge and the patent plate, right up until Touring went out of business in 1966 and the payments simply stopped.

The DB6 was never a factory competition car. By the time it launched in 1965, Aston Martin's works racing effort had already been wound up, the department closed in November 1963, and unlike the DB4 GT and DB4 GT Zagato before it, no DB6 variant was built or homologated to race. Its competition life has been entirely a second one, written by owners rather than the factory: DB6s turn up prepared for the Carrera Pan Americana, the Tour Auto and the Le Mans Classic, and the Aston Martin Owners Club's own race meetings have featured them at historic events like the Silverstone Classic for decades. It is a genuine motorsport life, just not the one the DB4 and DBR cars had, and not one Aston Martin ever put its name behind. The engine has a pedigree the car never got the chance to earn. Tadek Marek's alloy six, in 4.0-litre form, powered the DP212 that led the opening lap at Le Mans in 1962 and the DP215 that Phil Hill timed at 198.6mph down the Mulsanne in 1963 practice, among the first cars officially recorded past 300km/h there.

The DB6 looks enough like James Bond's DB5 that people assume it shared the screen time; it did not, and untangling that mix up is part of owning one. What it actually got was a different, quieter kind of fame. Mick Jagger wrote himself into DB6 history in August 1966 by crashing his midnight blue example into a Ford Anglia on London's Titchfield Street with girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton in the passenger seat, a suitably rock and roll way to total a grand tourer. Royal ownership runs deeper still: the then Prince Charles was given a DB6 Volante by the Queen in 1970, still owns it as King Charles III, and had it converted to run on surplus wine and cheese whey through a biofuel process, genuinely fuelling a sixty year old Aston Martin on leftover Duchy wine. His son borrowed a different DB6 Volante, the family's other one, to drive away from his own wedding to Catherine Middleton in 2011. Twiggy and Peter Sellers both owned DB6s in period, keeping it inside the same 1960s celebrity circle as its more famous sibling.

Owning a DB6 mostly means respecting two different metals. The aluminium body panels sit over a steel structure, and where they touch, electrolytic corrosion sets in quietly, usually first at the rear valance and around the door bottoms; underneath, the steel box sections and the Watt linkage mounting behind the rear seat rust the ordinary way, unseen until someone goes looking. Engines run hot if the silt that collects at the back of the block, furthest from the water pump, is left to build up, and a rebuild is not a weekend job or a modest bill when one finally comes due. The rare Brico fuel injected Mark 2 cars have a well earned reputation for playing up, which is why most were converted back to carburettors years ago. Electric windows slow down before they fail outright, and Connolly leather looks wonderful for decades right up until it needs replacing, at which point it is genuinely expensive. None of this is unusual for a hand built 1960s British Aston, and none of it should put you off: a well sorted DB6 is one of the most usable cars of its generation, built to cross a continent in a day and mean it.