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  • Posts: 6,665
    Good to hear that, @CommanderRoss. Every Alfa deserves attention and care. Even if that means a constant hole in your pocket. I had an Alfa for six years and spent six thousand euros on maintenance alone. But I'd do it all over again. And I still miss it.

    Love your car, @JamesCraig, btw ;) The front grill on that beast is a killer.
  • JamesCraigJamesCraig Ancient Rome
    Posts: 3,497
    Good news, my Alfa's coming home, and still working!

    Great news! :)>-
  • mtmmtm United Kingdom
    Posts: 14,861
    JamesCraig wrote: »
    mtm wrote: »
    Weird how it could almost be taken for a new Porsche there. The rear lights are especially similar.

    Porsche is a bit overrated.

    No, they're pretty good.
  • mtmmtm United Kingdom
    edited October 2019 Posts: 14,861

    That's a cool idea but the (presumably) fibreglass body panels really spoil it: flat panels aren't fibreglass's best purpose and it looks a bit cheap and plastic with those wobbly reflections.
  • JamesCraigJamesCraig Ancient Rome
    Posts: 3,497
    Eat this, Boris.

    Bw600m2.jpg [-X
  • MajorDSmytheMajorDSmythe "I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it."Moderator
    Posts: 13,882
    I don't get it. :-?? Is there a new design feature i'm not picking up on?
  • mtmmtm United Kingdom
    Posts: 14,861
    Yeah I'm presuming that's not official because it makes almost no sense! :)
  • JamesCraigJamesCraig Ancient Rome
    Posts: 3,497
    I don't get it. :-?? Is there a new design feature i'm not picking up on?

    I got this from their official Facebook page:

    https://www.facebook.com/astonmartin/photos/a.79369063354/10157098843208355/?type=3&theater
  • CommanderRossCommanderRoss The bottom of a pitch lake in Eastern Trinidad, place called La Brea
    Posts: 7,946
    They deliver certainty, where Boris doesn't deliver.
  • mtmmtm United Kingdom
    Posts: 14,861
    Something which could have made history different: Fleming may have picked an Aston Martin DB2 MkIII for Bond, but for himself he picked this AC Aceca, which I tend to think is a much nicer car! And this is his actual car:

    SR0087_Redline_Aceca-0105-1-1200x900_c.jpg

    SR0087_Redline_Aceca-0156-1200x900_c.jpg


    He bought this four years after he wrote Goldfinger, but I tend to think it might have been good to see Bond in an AC. Lovely, isn't it?
  • Agent_99Agent_99 enjoys a spirited ride as much as the next girl
    Posts: 3,099
    Saw this at Dunsfold today: the 24-litre, aero-engine-powered Napier-Railton.

    EGsbrKuW4AA0g-N.jpg

    EGsbrKwX4AA15zS.jpg

    As you can see, it requires a bump start :)
  • mtmmtm United Kingdom
    edited October 2019 Posts: 14,861
    Yes, that lives at Brooklands: I see it quite often and it’s one of my favourite cars.
    The W configuration of the pistons is quite surprising to see.

    It’s road legal, believe it or not: it even has a numberplate which flips down at the front!
  • Agent_99Agent_99 enjoys a spirited ride as much as the next girl
    Posts: 3,099
    It did a pretty gentle run; I can't imagine how it feels to do the ton in it.

    I was there to watch the VC10 start up and taxi, and I'm still a bit deaf today.
  • zebrafishzebrafish <°)))< in Octopussy's garden in the shade
    Posts: 4,311
    mtm wrote: »
    Something which could have made history different: Fleming may have picked an Aston Martin DB2 MkIII for Bond, but for himself he picked this AC Aceca, which I tend to think is a much nicer car! And this is his actual car:

    He bought this four years after he wrote Goldfinger, but I tend to think it might have been good to see Bond in an AC. Lovely, isn't it?

    I really love the AC Aceca, but this beauty, a different version of the car in Dr. No and with probably the most aggressive looking rear fins, is a good alternative to the AC for today's classic car driver.

    5230.jpg

    5230_3.jpg
  • CommanderRossCommanderRoss The bottom of a pitch lake in Eastern Trinidad, place called La Brea
    Posts: 7,946
    Not sure, I don't like the back ends of either car. too agressive.

    @Agent_99 pretty special day that!
  • edited October 2019 Posts: 2,887
    Here's Jeremy Clarkson's recent review of the new Aston Martin; it also discusses Bond.
    ____________________________________________________________________________________

    Skyfall's villains can blow this one up too
    The Clarkson Review: Aston Martin DBS Superleggera Volante (Sunday Times, Oct. 13)

    By Jeremy Clarkson

    Of course I will go and see the new James Bond film, but I almost certainly won't enjoy it. I haven't really enjoyed any of them since Daniel Craig took over.

    I know he wants his Bond to be fallible and weak, like the character in the books, but I don't want to see 007 swigging Heineken from a bottle that just happens to be label-side out, and I don't want to see him bleed, or fire his gun at something and miss. I want him to be Roger Moore, the cheeky chappie who could speak Latin, fly a space shuttle and lay anyone low with one of his signature karate chops.

    Craig's Bond can't do that. In fact, if you actually stop and think what he's done in the past, you'd have to conclude he's completely useless. In Casino Royale, he didn't notice that the woman he'd fallen in love with was spying for the other side, and then, despite his best efforts, he let her drown in a lift. The next woman he lurved, in Skyfall, got shot in the head by a former colleague. Oh, and then he took an old woman who needed to go into hiding to his own bloody house. Where she and 007's gamekeeper wandered about on a darkened moor, with a torch, just in case the baddies needed even more help locating her.

    Before that happened, though, Bond went to interview someone in Shanghai and ended up throwing him off a skyscraper. And in an earlier scene, he was shot by Miss Moneypenny. I'm telling you, Johnny English is better at espionage than this guy. So's Inspector Clouseau.

    But the worst bit in Skyfall came when the director Sam Mendes decided to blow up Bond's Aston Martin. So he pumped it full of bullets until it exploded.

    I'm sure, to the luvvie-in-chief, this was fine, because a car is just a collection of plastic and metal and glass. But a car is not just a collection of plastic and metal and glass. And Bond's Aston is more of a car than most. It has been a part of my life since I was four. I have owned many models, including one that would fire a small man under the sofa. And Mendes blew it up so he could get Craig to do some acting. I considered at the time filling Sam's dog with bullets until it exploded, just to show him how it felt.

    The car was put back together in the next Bond film, Spectre — and it appears in the new movie as well — but it was like making Ring of Bright Water 2 and trying to argue that someone had sewn the otter's head back on.

    I bet Aston Martin had a duck fit when it saw the DB5 reduced to a smouldering ruin, because Bond is its marketing department. He is its PR machine and its ad agency and its ambassador all rolled into one. So I bet it really did try to sew the DB5's head back on, because without 007, the company would have to maintain a public profile on its own. And it doesn't have the cash for that.

    I'm not sure it even had enough cash to develop the car you see before you today. It's called — deep breath — the Aston Martin DBS Superleggera Volante, and sometimes you get the impression that you're tootling about in almost two tons of make-do and mend. With a bit of cast-off Mercedes tech to maintain a veneer of modernity.

    To create it, Aston had to chop the roof off a normal DBS, but this meant finding somewhere to put the electric roof mechanism. That meant rerouting the massive exhaust system and that meant turning the fuel tank round and redesigning every body panel aft of the doors.

    The company managed it, but sometimes the roof doesn't go down when you operate the switch, the boot is laughably tiny, and it gets so hot in there, owing to the exhaust system, you could roast a chicken. There's also a problem with the interior.

    Astonishingly, we got four adults in it, and that's impressive, but it is almost identical to the interior you get in a far cheaper DB11 Volante. And that's not good enough.

    The basic starting price of the DBS Superleggera Volante is £247,500 and, I'm sorry, but if I'm going to blow a quarter of a million on a car, I don't want it to have the same innards as a car that costs almost £90,000 less. The trouble is, of course, that when you've spent all that money turning the fuel tank round, there simply won't be enough left to do the air vents as well. Or fit a glovebox.

    It sounds like I have a real downer on this car, and I haven't finished yet, I'm afraid. Because superleggera is Italian for "superlight", and it just isn't. With a couple of people on board, it weighs more than two tons. Perhaps that's why it endlessly catches its chin-mounted skid plates on speed humps. And why its tyres are so thin you need to be very careful when you're parking, even against a dropped pavement, or you'll kerb the wheels. Perhaps Aston should have called it Supergrasso.

    You can feel this weight when you're driving, too. It doesn't come across as a feisty little whizz-bang; it's no water boatman. But that said, it's fast. Rocket-ship fast. It's almost too fast, because on wet roads you would be well advised to treat the throttle with extreme caution or you will have a crash. You even need to be careful sometimes on dry roads.

    And that raises a question. If you can't unleash all the volcanic fury without the back end having a few moments of panic, then why not save yourself the best part of £90,000 and get the DB11 Volante instead? Because you can exploit all the power in one of those, all of the time. And it has the same interior. And it's a little bit more civilised and comfortable.

    It's almost as though Aston bit off more than it could chew with the DBS. Think of its engineers as pianists. They're accomplished enough to impress their friends and colleagues, but they're not really able to put on a penguin suit, walk onto the stage at the Royal Albert Hall and attempt Liszt's La Campanella.

    If you attempt to build a 211mph car that costs £247,000, you need to make sure that you have the money to pull it off. Yes, the DBS Superleggera Volante is one of the best-looking cars ever made, and it's blisteringly fast and it makes some laugh-out-loud noises from the tailpipes, but as a package, it's flawed.

    Hopefully, the new Bond film will be a gem and will keep alive the aura that surrounds the man and the car he drives. But I wouldn't count on it. The way things are going, they'll replace Craig with Anthea Turner and give her a Nissan Leaf. And that, I fear, would bring the curtain down on Britain's best-loved car-maker.

    In the meantime, if you want an Aston because you, like me, grew up worshipping them, then don't despair because the DB11 Volante is brilliant. That sort of car at that sort of price? Nobody does it better.
  • CommanderRossCommanderRoss The bottom of a pitch lake in Eastern Trinidad, place called La Brea
    Posts: 7,946
    IF I'd had the money I'dve stuck with the DB11 anway, I like my GT's more then the 'sports cars'.
  • JamesCraigJamesCraig Ancient Rome
    Posts: 3,497
    Alfa Romeo SZ.

    ExdkNuH.jpg

    Bi1Jmjv.jpg

    7JuZiqI.jpg

  • GoldenGunGoldenGun Per ora e per il momento che verrà
    Posts: 6,757
    JamesCraig wrote: »
    Alfa Romeo SZ.

    ExdkNuH.jpg

    Bi1Jmjv.jpg

    7JuZiqI.jpg

    My goodness, that’s one of the prettiest cars I’ve ever seen =D>
  • JamesCraigJamesCraig Ancient Rome
    edited October 2019 Posts: 3,497
    GoldenGun wrote: »
    JamesCraig wrote: »
    Alfa Romeo SZ.

    ExdkNuH.jpg

    Bi1Jmjv.jpg

    7JuZiqI.jpg

    My goodness, that’s one of the prettiest cars I’ve ever seen =D>

    IKR?

    I've always liked Zagato's designs very much. The fact that this car was only barely road legal makes it even more awesome.
  • PropertyOfALadyPropertyOfALady Colders Federation CEO
    Posts: 3,675
  • JamesCraigJamesCraig Ancient Rome
    Posts: 3,497
    9WqLUsx.jpg

    Noble M600...
  • zebrafishzebrafish <°)))< in Octopussy's garden in the shade
    Posts: 4,311
    I love the brutality of this car, a Bizzarrini GT Strada 5300 from 1967. It sits low on the tarmac and looks vicious, but comes in very elegant Italian clothing with Ferrari heritage. Bizarre. When it was first shown to the public, it was called Iso A3/C. In 1965, it had a top speed of 290 km/h, propelled by 365 bhp from a Corvette V8 engine. A green monster.

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  • CommanderRossCommanderRoss The bottom of a pitch lake in Eastern Trinidad, place called La Brea
    Posts: 7,946
    zebrafish wrote: »
    I love the brutality of this car, a Bizzarrini GT Strada 5300 from 1967. It sits low on the tarmac and looks vicious, but comes in very elegant Italian clothing with Ferrari heritage. Bizarre. When it was first shown to the public, it was called Iso A3/C. In 1965, it had a top speed of 290 km/h, propelled by 365 bhp from a Corvette V8 engine. A green monster.

    6-950x490.jpg
    23-950x490.jpg
    3-950x490.jpg

    Imagine going at, say, 250 in that car and then suddenly hve to brake.... What a wonderful machine though! Still can't beat the alfa in the looks department. That SZ is as lovely as they come!
  • MajorDSmytheMajorDSmythe "I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it."Moderator
    Posts: 13,882
    JamesCraig wrote: »
    Alfa Romeo SZ.

    ExdkNuH.jpg

    Bi1Jmjv.jpg

    7JuZiqI.jpg

    The Giuletta SZ is a very attractive car as most Alfa's are. But my favourite will always be the very striking looking SZ.
  • JamesCraigJamesCraig Ancient Rome
    edited October 2019 Posts: 3,497
    0QpnEqq.jpg

    Mercedes-Benz 500sec AMG wide body...

    For sale here: https://www.thiesen-automobile.com/angebot_detailansicht38573.html?f=new

    ;-)
  • PropertyOfALadyPropertyOfALady Colders Federation CEO
    Posts: 3,675
  • JamesCraigJamesCraig Ancient Rome
    Posts: 3,497
    D7e0TnJ.jpg

    V8 Vantage in onyx black.

    I'll say it again: apart from the grille it's a fine lookin' car.
  • CommanderRossCommanderRoss The bottom of a pitch lake in Eastern Trinidad, place called La Brea
    Posts: 7,946
    Even that grille is growing on me. It's a stylish car for sure!
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