Aston Martin DB2 Vantage

The initials of company boss David Brown were just two years featured on the Aston Martin sports cars, when a model change to the more modern DB2 was made. This sports car initially turned away from the open pre-war design and was initially only available as a Coupé. Also new was the 2.6-liter inline six-cylinder engine, which replaced the brand’s previous four-cylinder engines. For this purpose David Brown had bought up the competitor brand Lagonda especially to get this engine design by Walter Owen Bentley. Bentley was the founder of the well-known British luxury car manufacturer and had to leave it in dispute when Rolls-Royce took over in the 1930s. He subsequently hired at Lagonda as an engine designer before World War 2 and now became an engineer for Aston Martin. Three first prototypes of the new car started at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1949, still with a different Coupé bodywork and the tubular frame chassis of the 2-Litre Sports (DB1). For the production cars the Coupé bodies came from Mulliners of Birmingham (not to be confused with the coachbuilder Mulliner, thich today is a full subsidiary of Bentley).

The world premiere of the Aston Martin DB2 took place in 1950 at the New York Auto Show. With the chassis number 2, 3 and 4 the British brand participated again in the 24 Hours of Le Mans and repeated this in 1951. In these racing cars larger carburettors and a higher compression were tested, which allowed to increase the engine power output permanently by 20 to 125 hp. Robert Eberan von Eberhorst was hired as technical manager for these race operations and to overlook the technical changes. He and his team eventually incorporated the modifications into the new Vantage version, which wasn’t officially delivered to customers until 1951. However, two of them were already built in 1950, the first of which with chassis number LML 50/21 went to Briggs Cunningham in the USA. The name Vantage was derived from an employee of Aston Martin, who had been commissioned to look for a suitable word for the more powerful version in a thesaurus.

In total, Aston Martin produced only 411 copies of the DB2 from 1950 to 1953. Among them were 102 Drop Head Coupés, as the convertible version was initially called. With the more powerful Vantage engine, less than 250 cars in both body styles rolled off the production line. This was announced by the manufacturer for the Earl’s Court Motor Show in London as follows: “On the 1951 Earl’s Court stand will be displayed two Aston Martin DB.II saloons, one fitted with the regular engine and one fitted with the ‘Vantage’ engine, the high speed regularity of which was demonstrated so forcibly at Le Mans this year and last”.

Today, this founder of the name series is one of the most popular and sought-after classics of Aston Martin. Compared to the normal DB2, there are small surcharged to pay, and especially the rare DB2 Vantage Drop Head Coupés fetch high prices.

Images: Aston Martin