![]() Comfort levels are right up there with your sofa after Sunday lunch, and the interior itself is simple yet supremely stylish. It’s not a luxury sports car in the current sense (as we’ll discover in a moment), but it’s more feelsome and enjoyable to drive – as opposed to waft – than you’d credit.Īnother observation worth noting is it is very definitely a passenger’s car as well as a driver’s car. The Avons squeal their disapproval when you point the long nose enthusiastically into a turn, but beneath the nautical levels of roll the Lagonda handles tidily, with a sweet balance of grip front-to-rear and impressive agility for a car so dedicated to comfort. The Lagonda’s appetite for corners is less ravenous, the soft suspension yielding all-too-soon to the surprisingly quick-witted steering. An involuntary smile spreads across your face. ![]() Pull the sliding gear selector into ‘D’, ease your foot from the brake to the accelerator and the big wedge rumbles away. After churning on the ignition key for just long enough to have you worried, the V8 fires into life, each prod of the accelerator shimmying the Lagonda on its soft coil springs. Wheels are modest (by modern standards) 15in x 7in, wearing generously sidewalled Avon tyres. Powered by Aston’s famed 5.3-litre V8 (fed by a quartet of Weber carburettors) the Lagonda has a quoted 280bhp and 360lb ft of torque to propel its two-ton mass, via a three-speed GM TorqueFlite automatic transmission. The switchgear is like something from a classic Bang & Olufsen hi-fi. It’s all very Texas Instruments (if you’re younger than 30 you’d best Google it), strangely hypnotic, terribly confusing and totally illegible in bright sunlight. Fuel is shown as a percentage figure in the right-hand side of the display. Directly beneath it is the tacho, which gives you a two-digit figure for engine revs. There’s no logic to the positioning of these, so your speed is top left. In this S2 model all the car’s vital signs are displayed via a myriad red LED digital panels. You sit low within it, sunk deep into the exceptionally comfortable seat, hands resting on the surprisingly small, bizarre-looking steering wheel and peering at the huge black void of a dashboard. This is a luxury car in the ’70s shag-pile sense of the word, with little pretence at genuine sporting prowess. Of course it’s also the original ‘Marmite’ car, dismissed as a joke or maligned with ‘Ugliest Car in the World’ epithets, but judging by the many, many people who approach us during our time with the car, it also has plenty of fans. The shock value of its sheer size, straight edges and extended front and rear overhangs never wanes, but when you spend time with it your eye gets beyond the audacity and finds genuine beauty in the stance and purity of line. There are many amazing things about the Lagonda. Almost four decades after it was launched, time is still trying to catch up with William Towns’s vision of the future. ![]() Back in the ’70s, when supersonic air travel and manned space exploration were the norm, forward thinking required giant leaps to make an impact. Nowadays we’ve grown used to the future feeling as though it’s one small step away from the present. The trouble with bold attempts at futurism is they tend to look comedically old-fashioned in the blink of an eye. Factor-in legendary unreliability, single-digit fuel consumption, an obsession with increasingly ambitious and hopelessly dysfunctional instrumentation and truly extraordinary William Towns styling and you have what appears to be the perfect storm of harebrained 1970s lunacy and Aston Martin’s uncanny knack of powering full-throttle from the frying pan into the fire. As always with these things, timing is everything. Hindsight suggests this decision was at best optimistic, at worst suicidal, especially as deliveries didn’t commence for a further three years, by which time the world was in the grip of another oil crisis. > £1.75m Aston Martin V12 Vantage Zagato Heritage Twins by R-Reforged revealed in the flesh So what do you pin your hopes on to see you through such turbulent times? Why, an outlandish, fiercely expensive two-ton, V8-powered luxury saloon of course. The DBS is a typically potent and handsome machine, but in the wake of a global oil crisis that has seen a vicious spike in energy costs, petrol rationing and increasing political tensions between West and Middle East, thirsty GT cars are hardly flying out of the door. For a company that’s spent much of the previous 63 years turning insolvency into an art form, it’s nothing new, but it’s fair to say that straits have rarely been this dire. ![]() The year is 1976 and Aston Martin is on its uppers.
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