The oddities at the Penzance Rotary Club Classic Car & Bike Show included a golden thing that looked like the affair baby of an Alfa Romeo roadster and a Silver Ghost; a three-wheel Messerschmitt Cabin Scooter with the nerve to call itself a cabriolet and a picnic basket on the back, presumably for your body parts after it kills you. But the most beautiful car was the Aston Martin: a Vantage sports car. It is always an Aston Martin unless an understated Ferrari is lurking. Then it is still, probably, an Aston Martin.
The time when a 1960 Alfa Romeo Giulietta was normal has gone, along with the optimism that made it
The Vantage is as gorgeous as the new Aston Martin DB12 S, which I drove in France in May. A few mistakes aside – the Cygnet, their weird coalition-era city car, for example, which looked like the Fiat Panda would if it were sold into sexual slavery in Knightsbridge – Aston Martins just get better. According to the business pages the company is a basket case, but that is part of its myth: it grew out of armaments production and motor-racing. What do you expect – sanity? It is in the moonshot business: a mirror to our fatalism and romance. Without it we’d just have the Mini. There’s nothing wrong with a Mini, but they don’t exude lust.
