As I sit in the boardroom at Aston Martin’s Gaydon HQ, waiting for Adrian Hallmark to enter the room, I do a small mental calculation. And it turns out he is the tenth person to occupy the Aston Martin CEO’s chair in the 36 years I’ve been doing this job.
But, half of them have been in just the last 10 years: Ulrich Bez, who departed at the end of 2014, Andy Palmer who hung around until 2020, Tobias Moers who was in position until 2022, Amedeo Felisa from May of that year until September 2024 whereupon just less than one decade after the departure of Bez (and after a substantial period of gardening leave after leaving the same job at Bentley, time he spent racing Radicals), Hallmark got an offer he felt unable to refuse.
I’ve interviewed them all multiple times, save Felisa to whom I’ve not spoken since his Ferrari days as he never seemed exactly eager to talk to the press. What you got out of Bez depended entirely on the mood he was in that day – sometimes he was positively garrulous, at others you’d wonder if you’d not get more mileage from a Trappist monk. Palmer was always easy, affable and almost evangelical at times while Moers – who terrified most journalists – required a very specific approach: you wanted to be early on the list of interviewers, prove you knew your stuff and then be as bold as you dared with your line of questioning. Cheeky, even. Then he was brilliant. You always knew it was a good Moers day if, by the end, the PR person chaperoning him had their head in their hands.
