005 | Restoration
‘I called the number in California and put on my best English accent. She knew right away. “You’re calling about the car, aren’t you?”’
WHEN IT COMES TO RESTORING A CARE LIKE A DB5, there’s no shortage of long-established dedicated Aston specialists – on either side of the Pond. But, given its colourful history, something rather less conventional seemed more appropriate for DB5/2266/L. The answer lay back in the UK, with Hungerford-based Cars International, whose reputation and engineering credentials were forged not in the classic car world but in the white heat of Grand Prix racing. While the company has also made a name for its work on road going GT cars – Ferraris and Astons chief among them – THIS WAS CERTAINLY NOT YOUR TYPICAL ASTON SPECIALIST. ‘The car was 50 – and so was I – and I wanted it to come “home” for its 50th,’ smiles Hamish Hamilton. ‘So I put it on a boat and shipped it back to England for its next chapter.
The original engine block was too corroded to be saved. Other major work included reinstating the under-bonnet structure where it had been modified to take the Dodge engine.
I wanted the restoration to be a story, and to be a learning experience. I also wanted the absolute best. And I HEARD ABOUT A GUY WHO RESTORES FORMULA 1 RACING CARS and I thought that would be the perfect match.’ Enter Tim Preston, whose impressive CV includes working as Damon Hill’s race mechanic at Williams when he won the F1 world title. Today, he and his team at Cars International service and support any number of Grand Prix cars from the pre-KERS era. To have DB5/2266/L restored by a team who usually apply their skills to Formula 1 cars really fired Hamish’s imagination. For Tim, too, it was an exciting project. ‘We’d worked on a DB6 and a DB4 GT, but we hadn’t really done a total restoration on an Aston Martin before,’ he explains. ‘The whole thing would be a learning experience for us.’ So in the late summer of 2015 the car arrived at Cars International’s Hungerford workshops and the disassembly process began. ‘IT WAS LITERALLY A NUT-AND-BOLT RESTORATION,’ continues Tim, ‘in that the car was completely stripped to its individual components.’ The Dodge engine installed by Wilford Day in the early ’70s had since been replaced with an Aston straight-six, but that was a later unit from a wrecked DBS, and teamed with a non-original Tremec gearbox rather than the ZF unit the DB5 should have had, along with a non-original rear differential. All would have to be replaced, but first the body was taken back to a bare shell and stripped of all its old paint using a walnut-shell blast. ‘We then agreed a repair schedule,’ says Tim. ‘There wasn’t actually very much corrosion, so it was mostly returning the structure to original. The main job was reinstating the authenticity of the engine bay and the gear tunnel cutouts… ‘The Tremec gearbox conversion meant the prop shaft had been cut and the engine bay bulkhead had been hacked about. And where the Dodge engine had been fitted, some of the inner wings had been cut out and the cross-member had been modified. So THERE WAS A LOT TO GET TO GRIPS WITH TO RESTORE IT TO ORIGINAL. ‘But that was the fun bit, tracing its history and finding the correct parts. My dad ran a Jaguar garage, so these were the sort of cars I grew up with. The F1 cars in a way aren’t as interesting as a car like this!’ For the engine, again only the best would do, and Tim turned to an acknowledged global expert in the classic Aston straight-six, Dick Langford.
Stripped, repaired and primed, the bodyshell was ready for trial fitment of the main pieces of trim, including the grille (below) before going back into the paint shop.
Choosing the exact shade of white before the top coats were applied wasn’t the work of a moment!
New engine and transmission parts.
Dick, like Tim, has a background steeped in motorsport engineering (see panel) but he has also become ONE OF THE WORLD’S LEADING EXPONENTS IN ASTON STRAIGHT-SIXES. And it was soon decided that nothing less than a full engine rebuild was required for DB5/2266/L. Original parts from the spare engine that had been retained by Wilford Day were restored and reused where possible, but the engine block had extensive corrosion so a new one was sourced. The new block took the engine capacity from 4.0 litres to 4.2 – a common practice with rebuilt Aston straight-sixes, as it gives a much nicer spread of torque, or pulling power, without changing the fundamental character of the engine. ‘THE ENGINE WAS COMPLETELY STRIPPED AND EVERYTHING WAS CRACK-TESTED,’ recalls Dick. ‘Parts were machined and everything refurbished as necessary. The crank was ground, connecting rods balanced. New Cosworth-built pistons were fitted, along with new valve seats and guides and springs. ‘The cam covers were stripped and re-enamelled as original, and there were new exhaust manifolds, Zircotec-coated to help heat dissipation. The SU carburettors were stripped, refurbished and rebushed. It all looked like new.’ On completion, the engine was run-in on the dynamometer (or test-bed) and then given two ‘power runs’. ‘We saw around 280bhp, which is what we usually see from one of these engines,’ reports Dick.
MEANWHILE, TIM WAS SOURCING TWO PERIOD-CORRECT ZF GEARBOXES and taking the best parts of both to create a new ’box, rebuilt with new bearings and seals. He then sourced the correct final drive for the rebuilt back axle. And slowly but surely the Aston came back together. ‘We approached it very much as we would a Ferrari, where originality is everything,’ continues Tim. ‘Apart from the fact that it’s now a 4.2 rather than a 4.0, and it has electronic ignition for ease of starting, otherwise it’s completely to original specification, right down to the Selecta ride rear dampers, original spec brakes and unassisted steering.’ THAT ORIGINALITY IS NOWHERE MORE EVIDENT THAN INSIDE. As Hamish says: ‘The interior was dirty but beautifully original with a wonderful patina, and thinking about all the characters that had sat on those seats, I didn’t want to change any of it.’
Tim concurs: ‘The interior was very good. We re-Connolised all the leather and rebuilt the driver’s seat where it had sagged, but otherwise all the leather is original. The carpets, too. ‘The facia was stripped and rebuilt with a new wiring loom and there was a new headliner, but WE KEPT EVERYTHING WE COULD. ‘It’s what I would call a sympathetic restoration. It’s nice to see a car with original trim because you simply can’t recreate that. Too many restored cars today look brand new – and that’s 50 years of history just wiped out.’ Which, in the case of DB5/2266/L, would have been a very great shame indeed.
Original-spec brake calliper and three-eared ‘spinner’.
TIM PRESTON
Tim Preston and Damon Hill in his Formula One World Championship winning year, 1996.
After studying mechanical engineering, Tim joined Williams Grand Prix as a design engineer in 1988, progressing to race engineer. He was Damon Hill’s race engineer when Hill won the world championship in 1996 and with Heinz-Harald Frentzen when the latter was runner-up in 1997. After heading-up the track engineering department at Sauber for a couple of years, Tim was talked into returning to Williams for the 2000 season, acting as RACE ENGINEER FOR JENSON BUTTON AND JUAN PABLO MONTOYA, and stayed as a senior test and development engineer until 2005, leaving ‘when my face no longer fitted’ and then co-founding a service and restoration business as Cars International. ‘I was on gardening leave, looking for something to do, and ended up drawing a few bits for an old Ferrari Formula 1 car, and we thought maybe there was a business here…
‘At first we specialised in the later Formula 1 cars, mid-90s to mid-2000s, really anything before the modern hybrid cars. The other side of the business was classic cars, SO WE WERE RUNNING FERRARI 250s AT GOODWOOD, F40s AT THE FESTIVAL OF SPEED. and diversified into classic GT cars. ‘We’ve done everything from the Mille Miglia in a 1948 A6GCS Maserati Monofaro through to Formula 2 restorations for the BMW factory and working with McLaren and Williams on some of their restorations of historic Formula 1 cars’.
DICK LANGFORD
Dick Langford established Wellingborough-based Langford Performance Engineering in 1980 but his ENGINEERING PEDIGREE GOES RIGHT BACK TO THE LATE 1960s when he joined Cosworth as an apprentice. In the 1980s and ’90s, LPE would build and test Cosworth engines for the likes of the Lotus, Ligier and Tyrrell F1 teams, and today maintaining and restoring those classic Formula 1 engines remains a key part of the business. LPE also ran the single-seater racers for the Nissan World Series, which ran from 1998 to 2004 and saw the emergence of the likes of Marc Gené and Fernando Alonso, while LPE-built engines have powered drivers to wins in EVERYTHING FROM GROUP C SPORTS CARS TO BRITISH TOURING CARS. But LPE also builds and restores classic road car engines – one of its main clients in recent times has been Jaguar Land Rover Classic, for which it has built a substantial number of E-type engines. ‘We’ve also been building Aston engines for a number of years for various people,’ says Dick. Client confidentiality precludes him naming them, but they include a number of leading Aston specialists. Suffice to say, DB5/2266/L is in the best possible company.
