and fast growing than his competitors. During Bez’s tenure, he not
only has given the go-ahead to build the Design Studio, but also
was pivotal in bringing the world The DB9 and V8 Vantage, two of
AM’s most top-of-the-line cars. After five years at the helm, Aston
Martin became profitable, and he helped take the company private
(it was owned by Ford when Bez was hired.) And, of course, being
the CEO of the coolest automobile brand in the world he gets a few
perks. “Nearly everyday I’m driving something different,” he likes
to point out. “I drive competitors cars, benchmark cars, and cars
under development…of course most of this happens at night.”
If Bez was the fearless leader of AM in those crucial years,
Henrik Fisker was its artiste. Or, as some would say, “Henrik
was Bez’s Jonathan Ive.” (Ive is Apple’s Chief Designer.) Fisker,
born in Denmark in 1963, and a graduate from the prestigious Art
Center of Design, looks straight out of a Hansel and Gretel fable:
fine, sandy-blonde hair, an amiable smile and a sort of Icelandic
boyishness which can be disarming. Fisker, who left AM in 2004,
and founded the hybrid luxury carmaker Fisker Automotive in 2007
(he was forced to resign as Chairman in March of 2013), has a keen
appreciation of beauty and simplicity. “People want good-looking
cars,” he firmly believes, and “they will sacrifice size and space to
achieve that.” If nothing else, Fisker is a daring designer; he’s a
man who lets his intuition guide his designs and is always willing
luxury supercar ever built; each car took almost 2700 man-hours to
produce.) The whole company—and the wider luxury car world—
is still marveling about the 2013 Vanquish. The car goes from
0-60 mph in 4.1 seconds and can reach a top speed of 183mph; its
engine delivers a whopping 565 horsepower; its price tag a doublewhopping $279,995. It’s a work of design and engineering art that
was born at AM’s design incubator under, of course, the watchful
eye of Reichman.
“It’s our best AM thus far in terms of design and engineering,”
he has said. “It’s a real masterpiece of engineering and design.”
Lionel and Robert would be proud.
BAMFORD & MARTIN INC
The English poet and novelist Philip Larkin wrote of the year 1913:
“Never such innocence again.” The ravenous and debilitating WW1
(“The Great War”) was less than a year away, and would last a long,
bloody four years, introducing such destructive war machines as
tanks, submarines, bolt-action rifles, machine guns, gas bombs,
flamethrowers, Zeppelins, and body piercing grenades.
In the Kensington district of London, two pals, one an engineer,
the other a sporting motorist, were busy launching a revolutionary
automobile. Robert Bamford, the cerebral engineer, and Lionel
Martin, the free-spirited racing enthusiast from a wealthy family,
If you aged Daniel Craig twenty-some-odd years and gave him equal doses of
Terrence Stamp and a suave Austrian aristocrat, you’d have Dr. Ulrich Bez,
Aston Martin’s freewheeling CEO. “Nearly everyday I’m driving something
different,” he likes to point out. “I drive competitors cars, benchmark cars, and cars
under development.”
to take a chance. Fisker’s favorite AM design is the V8 Vantage.
The Vantage was able to achieve something that most cars can’t:
retaining heritage yet futuristic at the same time.
“It really shows you can do a modernistic car, taking the cues
from the history and delivering the heritage, but still do it modernly
and do it successfully,” he has said of the car. “That’s what I feel, at
least, that the car is.”
The man who replaced Fisker, Marek Reichman, who studied
vehicle design at the college of Art in London, and has had stints
at the Rover Group and BMW, first became chief designer at Ford
in 1999. His values are simple: Power. Beauty. Soul. Soul? (“Soul
for us is partly heritage.”) His first hands-on design at AM was
2006’s Rapide, the first four-door sedan ever relea 6VB'