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"Heritage," avers Aston Martin Chairman & CEO Dr
Ulrich Bez, "is history with a future." And indeed there
can be few makes with more motor sport heritage than
Aston Martin, whose very name celebrates the competition
success of its founder Lionel Martin. In 1913-14 Martin
enjoyed such a winning streak at the wheel of a specially
tuned Singer light car that when he decided to go into production
with a sporting car of his own design he coupled
the name of a favorite hillclimb venue — Aston Hill on the
Buckinghamshire border — with his own surname to create
a marque that has become one of motoring’s immortals.
The Aston Martin went into motor sport, as it were,
straight from the womb, for when back in 1966 I interviewed
Frank Hunt, who in 1915 had helped build the very
first Aston Martin of all — the unkindly-nicknamed "Coal
Scuttle", he recalled working long hours readying it to
compete in the London-Edinburgh Trial. There were early
successes at the Brooklands track, too, but it was in the
tough discipline of endurance racing that Aston Martin
found its true métier, racing in the Le Mans 24-hour classic
from 1928 and winning three of the coveted Rudge-
Whitworth Cups — the event’s highest honor short of
finishing first on distance — in the 1930s.
Despite sound performances in the postwar races on the
historic Sarthe circuit — there was even a second overall
and class win in 1955 — it was not until 1959 that Aston
Martin won Le Mans outright, when DBR1/2, driven by
Carroll Shelby and Roy Salvadori, took the checkered flag
(which is, incidentally, preserved like a holy relic among
the treasures of the Aston Martin Heritage Trust in the
medieval tithe barn that is the Oxfordshire headquarters of
the Aston Martin Owners Club).
One of the members of that victorious Aston Martin
team was Stirling Moss. His role in harrying the rival
Ferraris and encouraging their drivers to overstretch their
powertrains to the breaking point in the early stages of the
race was a crucial factor in the Aston strategy. Back then
Stirling was not the greatest fan of Le Mans, "I wouldn’t
drive there by choice, simply because of the slow cars
involved, plus the inexperienced drivers," he remarked
at the time.
Nowadays, he has a much more positive view of the
event, as he told me this April, just after he had demonstrated
the Le Mans-winning DBR1 to Queen Elizabeth II
and Prince Philip at Windsor Castle as part of the Aston
Martin Owners Club 70th birthday parade. "It’s real racing
now," he said. "Back in the 1950s the important thing was
to make the car last the distance, so you were always keeping
something in reserve..."
Having also won the World Sports Car Championship in
1959, the Aston Martin works team withdrew from racing
at the height of its powers, though they did come back with
the sleek four-liter "Project Cars" in 1962-63 under pressure
from their French distributor — and, having achieved
nothing, withdrew from racing again.
In 1982 — coincidentally the year of the 50th Le Mans
24-hour race — the introduction of Group C saw the Aston
Nimrod team, formed by Robin Hamilton, earn a seventh
overall placing, while an EMKA-Aston Group C racer was
17th the following year. But the Nimrod saga came to an
abrupt end in 1984. I was at a barbeque, hosted by Aston
Martin’s joint owner Victor Gauntlett alongside the old ACO
Museum in the Le Mans "village" that had just been
enlivened by a drunken spectator, who wandered into our
gathering and for some totally inscrutable reason took all his
clothes off, when the news came through that the Aston
Nimrods had both crashed badly on their 93rd lap, with
driver John Sheldon suffering serious burns, and the laughter
died away...
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