Background
When the DB7 was first seen on British roads in 1994, people didn’t just stop and stare. Strong men wept, women swooned and, legend has it, birds fell from the sky. It was, by common consent, the most beautiful car to come out of a British factory since the E-Type Jag.
What is more beautiful than a DB7? Well, according to Jeremy Clarkson, nothing, ‘…apart perhaps from the Humber Bridge and the Blackbird SR71 spy plane.’
The DBs of the ’50s and ’60s were bespoke, understated, very expensive and hand-built by men called Claude who wore brown coats with pens and micrometers sticking out their pockets. They were Savile Row, Cary Grant and winters in Antibes.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Aston Martin dropped the DB and chased the dollar with V8 Vantage brutes built to compete with the kind of American muscle cars favoured by the Dukes of Hazard. At least Aston Martin, being resolutely British, would have employed real Dukes.
Ian Callum’s DB7 emerged in the long shadows at the end of that era, when Aston Martin was presenting powerful misfits and oddities like the Virage to the world, and it pretty much saved the company.
Introduced initially with a supercharged 3.2 litre V6 engine loosely based on the Jaguar AJ6 unit, the i6, as it’s now known, was manufactured between 1994 and 1999. Developing a power output of 335 bhp and 361 lb⋅ft (489 Nm) of torque, the engine came with either a 5-speed manual or 4-speed automatic gearbox, with the latter being by far the better option for a continental GT like the DB7. A drophead Volante model was introduced in 1996, followed by the V12 Vantage in 1999 and GT/GTA variants in 2002.
Famously intended to be the Jaguar F-Type, the DB7’s chassis can trace its roots directly to that of the Jaguar XJS (which in turn can trace its lineage back to the XJ saloons of the late 1960s, which in turn utilized the rear IRS from the Jaguar Mk10 of the early 1960s and the front suspension of the Jaguar MK1 of the 1950s…). You’ll be pleased to hear though that the underpinnings were so thoroughly re-engineered by Tom Walkinshaw Racing (TWR) as to make them completely different cars.
Built in the same factory that was used to build the Jaguar XJ220, the DB7 is the only modern Aston Martin to utilize a steel monocoque body. Not that anyone has ever cared what it’s made from because the DB7 is one of the most beautiful cars of the 20th century.
It is so unutterably lovely that we have no doubt that we’ll look back in 50 years’ time and mumble about remembering when you could buy these for bugger all, as one glides past us. You know, like we do now about the E-Type, the air-cooled Porsche 911s, the competition-pedigree Fords, et al.
