Andrew Frankel: Are Aston Martin’s F1 drivers good enough for the dream team?

Elsewhere in this issue you will find my review of the Aston Martin Vantage, and suffice to say here it is a fairly impressive machine… But the magazine will be far more full of Adrian Newey’s recent decision to move from Red Bull to the Aston Martin Formula 1 team. It’s not for me to question the merits or otherwise of the move as there are far more knowledgeable and better qualified correspondents to make that call, but in a wider sense I think I can say how exciting the company’s future looks right now.

What usually happens next when I make any reference to the F1 team that flies the Aston wings is that a small queue forms of people keen to remind me that the Aston Martin F1 team is not owned by the Aston Martin road car company, but merely has the same name and same principal shareholder, Lawrence Stroll. Fair enough. But whether you like Stroll or not, and plenty don’t, he is currently presiding over a product-led recovery of the road car business, and has already brought it to the point where its model line-up is surely as strong if not stronger than at any point in history. And with his recent recruitment drive and the world’s most state-of-the-art wind tunnel he has put in place most of the pieces required to run at the front in F1.

The only question mark remaining concerns his drivers. One of the greatest talents of the era though he is, Fernando Alonso will be 45 before he first races an F1 car meaningfully influenced by Newey, and not even he is immune to the passage of time. And while I think Lance Stroll is better than most give him credit for, I am equally sure there’s not an impartial authority in the world who’d say he was truly top-drawer. Question is, will his father do what it takes to raise the quality of his driver line-up to meet or beat those of the teams with whom he will be wanting to fight at the front? Titles have been won, and lost, for far less.

How wonderful it was to see a car from the Preservation category win the Pebble Beach Concours, for it has never been won by a car in this class before. But to see the 1934 Bugatti Type 59, winner of that year’s Belgian Grand Prix, preserved in current form since 1937, complete with seemingly every nick, scuff, scratch and dent it has acquired along the way, was to know the right decision had been made.

I have always been fascinated by Bugatti’s most beautiful (if far from most successful) pre-war grand prix racer and knew this actual car, its former owner being an old friend with a fabulous collection of vehicles. Indeed it was from the same stable that I track tested an Aston Martin DBR4 for this title many moons ago. I could have the Bugatti too, but our paths never crossed and in 2020 the entire collection was sold. How good it is, then, to see current owner Fritz Burkard not only using the car, but roaming around the Pacific coastline while it was in California, just for the fun of it. You’d never have caught any over-restored prom queen exhibit being enjoyed in the same way.

“It was an entire hall of hideousness with Edsels, Pacers and Bricklins”

While in California I also took time to visit the Concours d’Lemons, a show for some of the very worst cars ever created. It differs from the British Festival of the Unexceptional which is largely just for very ordinary models. The US event welcomes not only cars that were truly terrible when new, but which have ideally deteriorated a very great deal since then. It was an entire hall of hideousness, a veritable chamber of horrors, populated by Edsels, AMC Pacers, Bricklins, Pontiac Azteks and so on. I was transfixed. Finding a star of the show was hard with so much choice. From the overseas entrants I guess I’d plump for the Subaru 360 with a notice in its windscreen proudly proclaiming it to have been the “worst car sold in the US” but I think I’d give the outright award to the 1971 Lincoln Continental coupé I found covered in weird green towelling material (simulating grass I think) with a life-sized glassfibre horse projecting through its roof. I liked too the fact that bribing the judges was actively encouraged and that even though we turned up soon after opening, the coffee had already run out and was reputedly not worth drinking in any case.

Back at home my beloved 1958 Citroën 2CV is finally running as it should. Ever since I swapped (but kept) its original 12bhp engine for a 1964 unit possessing the same 425cc but offering a heady 17.5bhp, it has never run quite right. The second engine came with a carb of the right size and make (26mm Solex) but was the wrong type and had some spindle wear, explaining its perpetual fluffiness on part throttle. But you can pay more for an apparently decent carb than the entire rest of the engine, put it on and still find yourself no better off than before. And correct models are exceptionally difficult to find.

But then a friend did exactly that, at a bottom of a box of bits. It was the right make, size and spec, and unused for the last 60 years. He refused payment and now the car runs as well as I could ever imagine it running. Tom Cribb, I owe you several.

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A former editor of Motor Sport, Andrew splits his time between testing the latest road cars and racing (mostly) historic machinery

Follow Andrew on Twitter @Andrew_Frankel