ASTON A NEW DAWN
Do you remember the Bulldog? Like the spaceship-shaped Lagonda, this was another of Aston Martin’s Seventies forays into crazy town – long, low, absurdly fast, and mooted for a limited production run but destined to exist only as a lonely one-off.
It was also mid-engined, a format Aston toyed with again in the early Noughties when the Vantage was being conceived. A full-size mock-up was built but, as we know, the production car was defiantly front-engined. The boss at the time, Dr Bez, wasn’t keen on it.
Ensconced since 2014, boss Dr Andy Palmer is no longer strictly new, but the next phase of his ‘Second Century Plan’ certainly feels it. The forward progress is relentless, to the extent that when Aston unveiled the AM-RB 003 and the (Vision) Vanquish (Concept) at the Geneva show the other month, it caught plenty of people off guard and prompted lots of snarky comments
