We all know that James Bond drives an Aston Martin DB5 – let's face it, it remains just about the best piece of automotive product placement in history, and loaning a prototype DB5 to Eon Productions in 1963 for the film adaptation of Goldfinger was a very clever decision. A decision that must have sparked regret over the years at Brown's Lane, given the reports that 007 had only gone to Newport Pagnell in the first place because Sir William Lyons had said no. Jaguar had refused to loan Cubby Broccoli an E-type for filming purposes, claiming it could already sell more E-types than it was able to build. While Jaguar has clawed back some of the opportunity for exposure in the last 20 years or so, it's been peripheral when compared with Aston Jaguars have always been driven by the bad guys or the supporting cast. But while the DB5 fitted in with Fleming's original novel, the fact is that even there it was only seemingly a twist of fate that meant Bond wasn't sitting behind an XK engine.
Ian Fleming wasn't exactly precise when it came to the cars used in the literary Goldfinger. Tilly Masterson's Triumph TR3 was clear enough, as was the evil Auric's Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, replete with canary yellow bodywork and riveted armour plating made of solid white gold. But Bond's own car was different. He was offered a choice of two cars, neither of which is made entirely clear by the form noted in print. He eschewed the Jaguar 3.4 from theexist – at least, not as a production model. And while it would be amusing to think of Bond tearing through Northern France and Switzerland in a DB3S Le Mans car, the truth is that Fleming probably meant the DB MkIII we have in these pages. And while there was a small saloon called a Jaguar 3.4; the retrospectively-named Mk1 precursor to bank robber favourite the Mk2, it's more than possible that Fleming was referring to the 3.4 litre Jaguar XK sports cars which offered Aston Martin performance at a reduced price. And the last of the famed XK120s would have been only four years old at the time of Fleming's book, so it's likely that it was one of these, rather than a staid saloon, that had caught the author's eye as a possible MI6 pool car for our hero.
