Manchester, multi-storey, damp Sunday afternoon. I’m idling the E39 around for a space when a chunk of proper Newport Pagnell royalty hoves into view. Empty bay beside it, as if the car park gods were saving me a front-row seat. Day: made.
I’ve always had a soft spot for these square-jawed Astons. Bill Towns drew something wonderfully contradictory: brutal yet clean, all Italianate poise with a very British stare. The later V8 Vantages are pure teenage-bedroom poster, but an early six-cylinder DBS like this has a quiet elegance that stands tall against today’s amorphous blobs.
This particular car - ANK220G, chassis DBS/5305/R - is a DBS Vantage, i.e. the 4.0-litre straight-six in hot spec, not a V8. It was originally finished in Aegean Blue with fawn Connolly hide, left the factory with a Borg-Warner auto, and later gained a five-speed manual and a raft of upgrades during a full professional restoration (2010–2012). The work list reads like a greatest-hits album from marque specialists (Pugsley & Lewis among them), and the file of bills totals £242,566.
Auction breadcrumbs put ANK220G back under the lights a couple of times recently: Goodwood FoS 2023 with a £150–200k estimate, then again recently in September 2025, when it sold for £110,400 inc. premium. Either way, it’s travelled a long road from its pre-restoration days.
None of which mattered in that moment. Seeing one at street-level, sat quietly in the bright-light of a car park, you realise how much presence these cars have. Low, wide, purposeful - and far more human than the carbon missiles they call supercars now. A proper Gentleman's car. A proper Aston. What a beauty.
