Simanaitis Says
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007, YOUR CAR IS READY (IF PREMATURELY)
THE 1959 ASTON MARTIN DB-4 could well have been 007’s first car, though it wasn’t. His Bentley 4 1/2 Litre (first appearing in the Casino Royale novel, 1953) was “almost new in 1933…one of the last 4 1/2-Litre Bentleys with supercharger by Amherst Villiers.” Other 007 cars appeared in print and film before the soon-to-be-famous Aston Martin DB-5 introduced in 1963 and appearing in the Goldfinger movie, 1964. By the way, in the 1959 Goldfinger novel, Bond drove an Aston Martin DB Mark III (a precursor to this R&T test car).
In any case, it seems that 007 had no influence in R&T’s cover feature/road test of the 1959 Aston Martin DB-4. Instead, the magazine got another Englishman of note, race driver Roy Salvadori, to compose the test.
Bylined R&T Road Tests. For many years, R&T road tests were purposely anonymously authored; this, reflecting staff consensus. Occasionally, a test performed overseas would carry a local byline.
Roy Salvadori was destined to co-drive with Carroll Shelby to win the 1959 Le Mans in an Aston Martin DBR1/300. Coming in second was another Aston, this one driven by Maurice Trintignant and Paul Frère (in time, R&T European Editor and friend).
Assessing the DB-4. “Thanks to a very low door sill,” Roy remarked, “the car is easy to get into, even with my long legs. Once inside, one is conscious of ‘completeness.’ The seats are luxurious, upholstered in leather, and give support where it is needed and allow a relaxed driving position, a vital factor in a car of this performance. At last a British manufacturer has seen fit to include as standard the Chapman Reutter seat mechanism, allowing finger-tip control for every possible angle to full reclining position.”
Roy continued, “At last I was ready to set out on my comparatively short test on busy English roads—not the best of conditions! After only a few miles I realized the DB-4 quite definitely had a dual personality. It is a very potent performer and a docile family car rolled into one.”
0 to 100 to 0. “I had read,” Roy said, “the publicity handout claiming acceleration to 100 mph and back to a stop again in 26.2 seconds, but just to convince myself I decided to have a go.”
“With a skeptical friend operating the stop watch and checking the speed with the speedometer (which was afterwards checked and found to be accurate),” Roy recounted, “I reached 100 mph and stopped dead again in 27.4 seconds.”
“Fair enough, I thought,” he wrote, “but immediately repeated this performance in about the same time to see if there was the slightest indication of fade in the brakes, for they had to work really hard bringing this 2884-lb car to a halt. There was none, a truly magnificent performance.”
The Grandmother Metric. “Very high performance,” Roy concluded, “has been achieved without the noise generally associated with a sports car, and there is space and comfort superior to many family cars—even your grandmother would not object to riding in the DB-4!”
Or even David Brown’s grandmother, I daresay. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023
Simanaitis Says 
Though it was suggested Ian Fleming, whose favorite personal car a ’57 T-Bird, knew more about skiing, cuisine, and British naval bureaucracy than cars, his popcorn novels had some nice wheeled passages.
The cinematic comic books, apparently aimed at 13-year-old boys, had not a single car from any of Fleming’s books.
Oft wondered what the Aston Martin owner got unavailable from an XK Jag for a third the price, tho’ Sir William Lyons, i believe circa late ’60s, while still on the board of Jaguar, no doubt inducing exasperation in his fellows, remarked, “We could never get our XK quality up to Porsche levels.”