2023 is a year of celebration for Aston Martin | Thank Frankel it's Friday

But so too is this the 75^th anniversary of the first David Brown car, the 1948 2-litre Sports which only retrospectively and informally became known as the DB1. Fans of the world’s least secret agent will be keen to recall the DB5 is 60 years old this year (we’ll gloss over the fact that Bond actually drove the essentially indistinguishable Series 4 DB4 Vantage), the company-saving DB7 is 30 years old, the Gaydon factory is 20 years old – as is the DB9 and so on and on. I’d like it noted that this year is also the 70^th anniversary of the then brand new DB3S coming first and second at the 1953 Tourist Trophy at Dundrod, Aston Martin’s first-ever victory in the World Sports Car Championship.

It’s all made me wonder if there is one word that can be used to describe those 110 years of this most fascinating of car brands. And I think that word is ‘survival’. By all rights, Aston Martin simply shouldn’t exist. It should have been wiped from the face of the earth so many times in the intervening years, yet if there is one talent Aston Martin has proven to have above all others, it is that which has enabled it to dodge an entire machine-gun’s worth of bullets over the years.

Its early history is quite extraordinary. In its first six years, the company known today as Aston Martin produced a grand total of two cars and, yes, there was a Great War for four of those years, but still. Proper production was not established until 1923, and by ‘proper’ I mean eight cars per year, at the fairly leisurely rate of a bit less than one every six weeks. Two years later it went bust for the first, but no means last time. That dispatched Martin from the business, Bamford having already long departed the scene.

Things did settle down after Bill Renwick and Augustus Cesare Bertelli bought the business for £10,000 in 1926, but there is no evidence at all that, despite making some truly wonderful cars between then and the outbreak of the Second World War, the company ever made a profit. This, then, was a company whose entire existence to date depended on its proprietors possessing a better than 1:1 ratio of largesse to business sense. For after Bertelli came an improbable cast of characters with even more improbable names who took it upon themselves to help bail out the company again and again, among them Count Louis Zborowski, Dorothea, Lady Charnwood and, my favourite, Lance Prideaux-Brune. The latter bought the company in 1929 with Sidney Whitehouse who sold it in 1933 to Sir Arthur Sutherland who, by Aston Martin standards, held onto it almost forever, not relinquishing control until he sold it to David Brown in 1947.

With Brown, another wealthy, patriotic investor, came the first period of solid, steady production, uninterrupted by bankruptcy or global conflict in the company’s already quite long history. It took until 1972 for it to revert to type after which, I am afraid, it all got rather complicated again. 

So far as I understand it, Brown sold to William Willson in 1972 who sold to a consortium headed by Peter Sprague, George Minden and Alan Curtis in 1974. But by the early ‘80s, it was owned by Pace Petroleum and CH Industries. Pace owner Victor Gauntlett then sold his share to Greek shipping magnate Peter Livanos in 1983 who owned it with Nicholas Papanicolaou. They formed a company that bought out CHI and left Gauntlett running the show.

They sold to Ford in 1987 which put it in its Premier Automotive Group in 1999 with Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo which was then broken up in 2006. It was acquired by Kuwaiti investors Investment Dar and Adeem International who, with Italian private equity firm InvestIndustrial, owned most of the company until the disastrous IPO of 2018. But in 2020 Lawrence Stroll took control of the company, while Mercedes-Benz increased its holding from five to ten per cent. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund took a stake as, perhaps most significantly, did Volvo-, Polestar- and Lotus-owning Geely in September of last year.

And that, I think, is where it stands today. Do I think it will last? Will a period of some decades of stability such as those enjoyed by the likes of Bentley and Rolls-Royce now commence? I wouldn’t have thought so for a moment. The company remains mired in debt, its Italian CEO, Amedeo Felisa is a highly regarded engineer and former boss of Ferrari but he is also 76 and surely not a long-term appointment. Will Stroll continue to tough it out – he is many things, among them a man who hates losing – or will Geely make him an offer even he cannot refuse? It is impossible to say.

All I can predict with reasonable certainty is that until Aston Martin is sold to a massive automotive concern like Geely, it, like McLaren and quite unlike Bentley and Rolls-Royce, will remain on the rollercoaster of fortune. And while a bit of me is fascinated just watching the ride, far more of me wishes it would just settle down under the stable, secure wing of a well-resourced, benevolent proprietor and forever after only make headlines for the brilliance of the cars it is producing.