An Appreciation of the Aston Martin Lagonda
When you stop to ponder on any given situation, you come to realise that, in most cases, all is not as it first appears.
The world starts revealing its true self to you as you progress through infancy, through childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Indeed, there are things even for a wise old man to learn - and indeed, the learning of such things keeps such a senior citizen interested in life, and therefore alive.
But as children, we usually find out that Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy are from the same imaginary tribe (hopefully, with the latter, we will have found that out long before we are tempted to using a ball-pein hammer for pecuniary advantage), and we eventually come to realise that the Wicked Witches that populate the tales which passed for pre-pubescent horror-stories were made so by bias to try telling a story of right and wrong.
It isn't 'til we are much older, though, that we learn the folly of another fairy-story. Cinderella is usually accompanied by two sisters, ugly sisters who kept her light hidden under a bushel of jealousy and envy. But she had more than two sisters - and they weren't all thrashed to within an inch of their lives with the ugly stick. But then they weren't all human either. So there are houses whose beauty hasn't been appreciated, there is music which hasn't yet struck a chord, there are unsung ballads for want of the right singer.
There are also many cars which could be counted amongst Cinderella's neglected siblings - the Renault A610 Alpine and the Lamborghini Espada spring to mind, as do the Humber Snipe and the Wolseley Hornet, the Austin 3-litre and the Mini Moke. But the crimes of neglect perpetrated against these cars are nothing compared to the mark of disdain laid at the door of that futuristic show-stopper, the Aston Martin Lagonda.
The show it stopped was the 1976 London Motor Show, and the reason why the whole of Earl's Court was deafened by the sound of jaws hitting the floor, and flooded by all the drooling, was that nothing quite like it had ever been seen. True, there were other sports saloons at the time, such as the Ferrari Mondial, but this was something else. With its sleek expanse of aluminium stretching back from the chromed portico grille and narrow letterbox fog- and spot-lights to a vast area of glass, and thence aft to a most futuristic four-door saloon body, it was a sight to have many a small boy clutching where he ought not to be clutching. Not only that: it boasted electronics which would have been considered advanced for the Starship Enterprise - with liquid-crystal display instrumentation, touch-sensitive buttons and a whole host of gadgets to send the most hardened techno-geek into paroxysms of ecstasy And when you consider that Aston Martin Lagonda (the company) had just been fished out from down among the dead men of history, for the newly kissed-of-life entity to be immediately up and performing an entrepreneurial decathlon was beyond belief.
But as with many things, all was not as it seemed. The car had been built from the drawing-board to finished model in less time than it takes for a foetus to gestate - and as a result, the first car to actually end up with a customer wasn't delivered until three years later - it took that time to get the electronics sorted. Even then, it achieved notoriety by, as Rolls-Royce would term it, "failing to proceed". However, the model proved to be a delight, even if its electronics were somewhat dicey - many owners have converted the dashboard to a more reliable, if duller and less authentic, analogue set-up. Still, things improved from the early cars, when the LCD readouts were replaced by Cathode-Ray Tube instrumentation - and more reliable switches and buttons.
What's the car like to drive? Well, it does what it says on the tin, largely - this is a sports saloon, a driver's car as opposed to a limousine in the Rolls-Royce tradition. Then again, Lagonda have a tradition of sports saloons going back to the early days of Wilbur Gunn's Staines operation. Being a bigger car than its Aston Martin stablemates, and yet sharing with them the same engine, have lead some to complain that the car is under-powered. Perhaps it is - but only in the way that Thrust II is underpowered with the addition of its driver. Okay, so it wasn't built to win races - but who cares? The car has presence - and I have yet to encounter a hill which the five-point-three litre V8 can't get the car up, as if its fundament was on fire.
The biggest problem with this car, though, is that somehow it has an image problem. Say what? Some people look at the Lagonda and think it's tacky - a dark reminder of the greed-is-good generation, a car devoid of taste as a paean to excess. But this is something I've never been able to understand - so what if it's got more cow hide than a Swiss pasture, or more wood than a man o'war. So have lots of cars which enjoy centrally heated and Wilton-carpeted garages. So what if some people thing it has garish ostentation writ large across its flanks - doesn't mean they are right, or that thirty million Elvis fans can't be wrong. And who cares if the boot isn't quite as big as it promises, and that the arrangement of the rear lights along its vertical edge necessitates another set of lights set inside the lid itself? I think it has bags of character - and that rarest of things in motoring, a soul.
In 1986, the Lagonda was revised - most of the flaws were removed, but for me so was much of the magic. Still, in the fourteen years since the initial motor-show appearance and the end of production, a total of 593 cars were produced. To see one, therefore, is like seeing a child seeing the Tooth Fairy, but without losing a tooth.
