STIRRED, BUT NOT SHAKEN

‘We’d done the DB7, got the company back in a favourable place. Aston Martin’s MD Bob Dover wanted a tougher-looking, modern DB7 and asked for sketches. “There’s no guarantee you’ll get the job,” he told me. Was he bluffing? Well, he’s still a good friend, but he certainly got me on my toes. Anyway, I showed him some ideas. “We’ll do this one here,” he said.’

Sounds simple. Ian Callum’s dulcet Dumfries burr emanates from my phone’s speaker, and the subject matter is the Aston Martin V12 Vanquish. Difficult to believe, but that car is now celebrating its 20th birthday. Two decades have slipped past since it wrested Aston Martin into the modern era, technologically and stylistically, while still being built at Newport Pagnell.

So much has changed since. Yet the visual genes of the current Aston range hark back to this car more than any other. And it’s powered by that venerable 5935cc V12, the one that made its debut in 1999 in the DB7 Vantage and went on to power the DB9, the DBS, Rapide, Vantage and the second-generation Vanquish, and remains in production (albeit shrunken to a 5.2, and boosted by turbos) to propel the current DB11 et al.

So Callum’s Vanquish is an important car. A milestone in Aston Martin history. A proof of concept that everything since refers back to still. Simple, though? Actually, anything but, as it turns out.

‘I was freelance back then, doing work for TWR. Aston Martin didn’t have an R&D or even a design department,’ says Callum. ‘By good fortune, I’d ended up working on the DB7. Bob Dover gave me a job: to develop a replacement for the V-car.’

You’ll recall the era. Aston Martin had been