The Vanquish at 25

Twenty-five years ago, one of the most significant cars of my career was launched at the Geneva Motor Show. Not only important to me but, I like to think, important to its company too. The Aston Martin Vanquish. But the story of any car starts long before its launch date.

During 1996, Bob Dover, MD of Aston at the time, contacted me at TWR to ask if I’d be interested in shaping a new concept car for the marque. I was asked because of my involvement with the DB7, the V12 version of which was by now in the pipeline. I’d worked on the facelift and got to know Bob through the mid-1990s. Aston Martin as a brand was growing in confidence due to the success of the DB7, and internally at Ford it had the blessing of Jac Nasser. However, the company was still without a design studio so such work still had to be outsourced, much to my delight.

The new concept would be more muscular than the DB7, something to be seen as a successor to the by now defunct Virage. Bob made it quite clear that although this was a concept, it had to be approached as something that could be turned into a production car without too much disruption. His intentions were clear to me: create a concept compelling enough that the bosses at Ford, especially Nasser, would simply have to find enough budget to turn it into reality.