- A 19-year-old Welsh welder bought this DB5 Vantage for £900 in 1970.
- Aston Martin Works spent 2,500 hours restoring it to as-new condition.
- The owner kept it for 50 years, even when life and kids got in the way.
The Aston Martin Works restoration team has just rolled out a DB5 Vantage so polished it looks like it fell out of a Bond film. Yet the immaculate bare metal rebuild is only the second most astonishing thing about it.
The real jaw dropper is the story of its current owner, who bought it when it was just eight years old, and he wasn’t much older.
A Young Man’s Aston Dream
Welshman John Williams was just 19 when he finished scraping together £900 in 1973 to buy his dream car, a 1965 DB5. Sure, we’re kind of used to teenage influencers swanning about in leased exotics these days, but it didn’t happen to normal people back in the 1970s, especially not welders from Wales.
Related: This Nearly-New Aston DB12 Lost Enough Value To Buy A New BMW M5
Williams saved every spare penny for over a year and worked a ton of overtime to scrape together that £900 ($1,190 at current exchange rates, though that figure isn’t applicable here), which Aston claims equates to £15,000 ($20,000) today, but according to the Bank of England’s historical inflation calculator is really only around £10,000 ($13,000).
Whatever the true figure, it tells us two things: our welder did an awesome job of saving a stack of cash in a short time, and damn, exotic cars have gotten expensive. Try to pick up an eight-year-old DB11 today, and you’d be looking at spending at least £60k ($79k), or more than £100k ($130k) for a Vanquish.
In September of ’73, the Aston-obsessed teen jumped on a train from North Wales to London to go see the car in person. It was the more performance-focused Vantage model with triple Weber carbs and 325 hp (330 PS), and the Motorsport magazine ad for it promised plenty of service bills.
It’s rare, too: only 39 of the 1,022 DB5s Aston built between 1963 and 1965 were right-hand drive coupes built to Vantage spec and painted in the same Silver Birch as 007’s car.
Williams liked what he saw, handed over the cash, then he drove the silver Aston all the way back to Wales and used it as a daily driver for a few years. But life intervened when Williams took a job in the Middle East in 1977, and the DB5 was left on the driveway where it quietly deteriorated.
His wife Sue recalls neighborhood kids bouncing on the bonnet and one energetic child snapping the exhaust pipe clean off. Offers to buy the car came and went, but she always told him that he would never get another one. So Williams hung on to his Aston through family life and financial ups and downs.
Half a century later, the couple brought the crusty classic back to Newport Pagnell for a full works restoration. Over 2,500 hours of panel beating, paintwork, trimming, and parts sourcing later, the DB5 is better than new.
Aston doesn’t reveal how much the resto cost, but given that the finished car would probably be worth as much as £1 million ($1.3 m) and he only paid £900 for it, we’d say he’s quids-in.
Aston Martin
