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By 1992, things were starting to slow with sales of the Virage
and even the introduction of the Volante didn't make too much difference. The
economy wasn't picking up and demand was dropping. Thus it was down to the
Customer Service Division (now Works Service) to step in and try to bring in
some money by offering upgrades and conversions as they had always done. So we
got the 6.3 Virage, and the Shooting Brakes and the four door Virages. Although
the four (and five) door Virage were announced to the public no-one outside of
AML knew that a few were built for a wealthy overseas customer. Following on
from these,
WS continued working on ultra exclusive unique coachbuilt cars for the wealthiest
people in the world but in total secret. Indeed, it has been said that one
customer in particular bought so many cars, that AML would not have survived
without his patronage. I won't be so rude as to say who the customers were but I'm
sure you can guess. The first indication that anything was built was in an
article in the the Autocar magazine, 2nd September 1998 where someone undercover took
pictures in a warehouse full of exotics in South East Asia - you must get a copy, trust me.
More recently, small pictures have appeared in 'Works Tourque', the magazine
sent out to customers of Works Service. But effectively, the specially
commissioned Works Service cars have remained hidden and an almost total
secret............until now.
The cars were first seen
in a 2007 book, Aston Martin
:Power, Beauty and Soul, written by a
friend of mine called David Dowsey. Effectively, the book covered the full
story of AM during the Ford years from 1987 to 2007 including the prototype Rapide and
DBS V12. It took six years to write and contains over 100,000 words and
hundreds of photos, many previously unpublished. David has
travelled the world to interview dozens of key AM personnel
including past and present employees, engineers, designers, directors and
previous
owners of the Aston Martin company. The book features over sixty models and
variants and also has full specs, charts and chassis numbers.
Those pictures first seen in the
book have now been made available to me by Aston Martin and I'm very happy
to be able to share these with you over the next few weeks. |
