CLONED

Words - tIm nevInson

Images - tIm nevInson - Jaguar magazIne iI WAS ASKED TO DO A HUNDRED MILE ROUND TRIP recently in an Aston Martin DB7 Volante. I went through its history in my mind and realised that although I had driven one before, I couldn’t remember much about it. Probably because I was twin testing it with a Ferrari 400. Considering it’s a close relation to Jaguar and Ford products, I was quite surprised that I hadn’t spent much time in one.

Being an automatic transmission Convertible, this one wasn’t going to be a road burner, but sporty and brisk nonetheless. The history of the DB7 is quite interesting, it could quite easily have never happened, had it not been for the ever-entrepreneurial Tom Walkinshaw. Tom’s DB7 rescued Aston Martin and turned it around, so whatever connoisseurs of the marque think of the DB7, which was relatively high volume and relatively cheap, they have a lot to thank it for.

Aston would be no more without it.

During the last years of my first stint at Jaguar I was in charge of the target setting validation of all of our competitors against particular projects of our own. I would organise ride and drives by the Vehicle Assessment Group (a load of highups) with say six or seven competitors for each projected model range.

I was slightly out of the mainstream of engineering by then, but the future projects we were benchmarking were the XJ41 sportscar, X200 (S-Type), X300 (XJ) and X400 (X-Type). I spotted some documents with ‘XX’ and ‘NPX’ written on them, which took me by surprise. What was that then?

To me the ‘XX’ was the Rover 800 series joint venture with Honda, but since Rover had split from Jaguar by then, it wasn’t going to be that.