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Welcome to the Aston Workshop news section. This section will update regularly, enabling you to keep up to date of changes and new information relating to the Aston Workshop and the Aston Martin Marque.
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David Jones is an Englishman who now lives in Florida, USA. He has recently brought his DB2 to the Aston Workshop for restoration after discovering the car once belonged to Aston Martin owner David Brown and took a starring role in the 1954 film ‘The Devil on Horseback’.
“I recently decided to ship my Aston Martin DB2 back to the UK for a full restoration by Aston Workshop. I did a fair bit of internet research and decided they were the best Aston restoration team to get a really good job done on my car. The project actually started in early December of 2007 and should be finished around the end of 2008. I can’t wait to get the car back – it’s the perfect way to go to the golf course on Saturday morning!
“I’m an Englishman living in Florida – actually I’ve lived all over the world – Sri Lanka, England, South Africa, France,Holland, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Scotland and, before Florida, in California on the other side of this country. I’ve always loved and admired Aston Martins and currently have three of them – the DB2, a 2001 DB7 Vantage Volante and a 2007 Vantage Coupe. They are all different and they’re all great – my favourite, however is undoubtedly the earlier car – I love the DB2’s overall sweeping lines; it’s Lancaster-bomber-like dashboard (my father was a WW2 Lancaster pilot); it’s quasi-boat-tailed trunk – there’s really nothing I don’t like about how it looks. To me they’ve always seemed like a pivotal design for Aston and their shift from very traditional to quite modern looking cars. They certainly fascinate me.
“My interest in DB2s actually started in South Africa where I found a wrecked drop-head under a tarpaulin in an orchard just north of Johannesburg in about 1976. I started a fairly half-hearted re-building effort, but ran out of both time and money and ended up selling it to a local doctor - a major classic car re-builder who I hope managed to get it back on the road. It was a nice car, but with some major problems – like an engine whose crank had broken and severely damaged the block - so I was not entirely unhappy to see the back of it.
My current DB2 is a much more interesting car. I bought it in 1999 in partnership with a colleague from work in who sold me his 50% share shortly afterwards – a good decision for me as it turns out. It was languishing in a garage in Palm Beach, Florida – just about running from a mechanical point of view and actually quite good-looking cosmetically. Overall it’s fairly original with not much missing – just a bit tired. I ran it in the heat for a couple of years (try driving in 100+ degrees with 98% humidity with all that warm air coming through the bulkhead – fairly sticky!) but always planned to do a re-build and use it a lot more once I could spend more time on the project and less time flying around the world in 747s selling computer software (which is what I do for a living).
A couple of years ago I started to really research the car’s history and what was when the whole project got a lot more interesting.
It turns out to be a fairly early DB2 – chassis number LML-50-186 – but fitted with a prototype 2.9-litre engine, number DP-105V. Its original registration was YMD 170, and the original number plate was on the car when I found it. In researching its registration details I found out it was actually a car supplied for use by Aston Martin itself and the reason that the engine was up-rated from the standard 2.4-litre unit to the larger capacity was that its principle user was David Brown himself! Presumably he wanted to impress his friends and potential customers as to the performance of his latest model.
I am still busy trying to find more out about the car, looking for period photographs and so on, but to date the most compelling evidence as to the car’s provenance is a photograph I found showing YMD 170 in a publicity photograph from 1954 parked outside the Beaconsfield Film Studios near London. In the car are two famous film stars from the 1950s British movie industry, John McCallum and Googie Withers –a well known leading man and lady team who were also actually married. They are apparently still alive, are still married and live in Australia. I have tried to contact them but no luck yet – I wonder if they remember the film and the car?
The legend with the photo reads as follows:
“The Patron’s personal coupe of 3 litres, which he loaned to the Clerk of the Course at Autumn Snetterton, will shortly become a screen star, for this photograph was taken by Richard Cantouris at Group 3’s Beaconsfield Studio while the car was on loan for the production of a new film ‘The Devil on Horseback’. Co-starring in the film will be Britain’s famous man and wife team Googie Withers and John McCallum, pictured with YMD 170”.
So - from everything I can see, it does really look like Sir David’s personal car which makes the whole project that more exciting and interesting for me. If anyone reading this newsletter has any more information that would allow me to build a more complete portfolio of its history, please let me know. In particular I am looking for either a copy of the film itself – it would be fantastic to get a re-print to be able to see YMD 170 in action and to make sure we do the restoration as originally as possible. Secondly, I understand that a considerable number of publicity photographs were taken during this period of Sir David with his DB2’s and DB3’s and I am hoping we can find one or more showing the car. So – if you have any pictures from the early to mid 1950s showing drop-head DB2’s at Le Mans, Snetterton or anywhere else please do take a look and see if any of them are of YMD 170 – I would very much appreciate it.
I have attached a couple of pictures of the car – the original picture plus a few more recent shots I took in Florida before the car headed home to the United Kingdom and Aston Workshop. I’ll be happy to do an update as to progress sometime next year - in the meantime I very much look forward to working with the very talented team at the Aston Workshop on the project and to getting a wonderful and unique car back to drive and enjoy in about 12 months time.
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