ASTON MARTIN

V8

The Aston Martin V8 is the muscular British grand tourer that carried Aston Martin through two turbulent decades. Its body, a broad-shouldered, four-headlamp coupe styled by William Towns, first appeared in 1967 on the six-cylinder DBS, but the car only found its true character in 1969 when Tadek Marek's new 5.3-litre quad-cam V8 engine was finally ready and the DBS V8 was born. From 1972 the model dropped the DB prefix and became known simply as the Aston Martin V8, gaining a cleaner twin-headlamp nose. Entirely hand-built, each Aston Martin V8 took around 1,200 man-hours to complete, and the range ran through five distinct series, with the fuel-injected early cars giving way to Weber-carburettor versions and later to the brutal, blistered Vantage and the elegant open Volante. The fearsome Aston Martin V8 Vantage of 1977 was hailed as Britain's first supercar, with around 390 horsepower and a 170 mph top speed, while the Aston Martin V8 Volante became a favourite of royalty and celebrities. A V8 also starred alongside James Bond in The Living Daylights. Built at Newport Pagnell until 1989, roughly 4,700 examples of the Aston Martin V8 were made, about 1,200 of them Volantes, making it the backbone of Aston Martin production in the 1970s and 1980s and a cornerstone of the marque's heritage.