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.
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, classily 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 supercharged engine loosely based on the Jaguar AJ6 unit, the i6, as it 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 Volante model was introduced in 1996, followed by the V12 Vantage in 1999 and GT/GTA variants in 2002.
While later variants may have got faster and fatter, with different bumpers and bodywork tweaks, the ’94-‘99 6 cylinder model is considered by purists to be the real Ian Callum design masterpiece. Clean and unfettered, svelte and muscular, it is undeniably a treat to behold from every conceivable angle.
