"Licence to drive" -- Clarkson on 40 Years of Bond Cars

Way back in 2002 the Sunday Times commissioned Jeremy Clarkson to write a trio of articles on James Bond's cars, to coincide with the 30th 40th anniversary of the series and the premiere of Die Another Day. The articles also premiered on the same day (Oct. 20) as the relaunched version of Top Gear, starring Clarkson and Richard Hammond (James May joined them seven months later). Here they are:

Licence to Drive (Sunday Times, Oct 20, 2002)

James Bond’s cars are usually just as eye-catching as his women. but sometimes 007’s choice of wheels suggests he’s had a few too many martinis, says Jeremy Clarkson.

James Bond, in the books, has a blower Bentley. A big old truck with the engine from a Spitfire and the wheels from a unicycle. The sort of car where you had to go outside to change gear or blow the horn. This is fine for Mr. Toad, all goggles and earflaps. But it’s not so good for the most suave secret agent the world has ever seen. So when he’d found his feet in the films, they gave him an Aston Martin.

Over the next 37 years, Bond remained as loyal to the car that brought him fame as he did to his women. Throughout what are best described as the “comedy years”, he used a Lotus Esprit, an amusing Citroën 2CV and even a car that flew. Yeah, right. But the lowest point came after we’d been through the Scottish Bond, the Australian Bond, the amusing English Bond and the Welsh Bond. Suddenly we had an Irish Bond and a corporate tie-up with BMW. In exchange for having their cars in the films, they’d spend a few million on promotion. How very tacky.

Occasionally, over the years, he was to be seen back in an Aston. Arriving at the country house in The Living Daylights. Racing back to London from his Danish lesson in Tomorrow Never Dies. Improbably squealing his tyres on the sand in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And now, for the film Die Another Day, he’s in a Vanquish. Actually, he isn’t. In real life, this, the latest and snazziest Aston of them all, is plagued with problems. The clutch gives up the ghost if you attempt a full-bore standing start, and in town the differential feels like it’s trying to hammer its way into the boot. So Bond’s car has the gearbox from a truck and, to make way for all the gadgets, including a hidden four-wheel-drive system, the 6.0-litre V12 has been swapped for a crude Mustang V8. In fact, it’s only an Aston Martin because the badge says so.

What he should be using is the car he was first given way back in 1964. The DB5. This is the quintessential Bond car, as identifiable with 007 as the Walther PPK and the white tux. And this car did more than make Bond. It saved Aston Martin. All of the hackneyed old business clichés were coined for this little-known sports-car company. “How do you make a small fortune out of Aston Martin? You start off with a large one.” From 1923 to 1987, when the company was bought by Ford, there wasn’t a single year when it made a profit. Famously, its former boss, David Brown, who gave it the DB initials, was once asked by a customer who was jibbing at the £4,000 price tag on a DB4: “Can I have it at cost?” “Sure,” said Brown. “That'll be £5,000.”

So, when Harry Saltzman, the Bond producer, called the Newport Pagnell factory in 1963 and asked if they could use a DB5 in Goldfinger, you’d have expected the answer to be a resounding yes. But it wasn’t. Aston Martin’s then general manager, Steve Heggie, explained that the company had many requests from film companies and it was rarely worth their while. Saltzman was stunned. “Haven’t you seen Dr. No?” he blustered. “No,” said Heggie. “From Russia with Love?” “No,” said Heggie again. Saltzman was amazed. Bentley had already turned him down, and now this! He pointed out that in the Goldfinger novel, Bond actually uses a DB3. He talked about all the extras Fleming had envisioned way back then: a Colt .45 in a tray under the driver’s seat, and a radio that was capable of receiving a homing device. He said he would make the car a star.

And eventually, Heggie saw sense, saying they could have a DB5... for £4,500. He only backed down when he was presented with the scripts. And as a result, Aston Martin survived, and one of the most famous cinema marriages was made. Bond would get a DB5. Look at the publicity photograph of Sean Connery leaning on the car in the Swiss Alps. He simply couldn’t have driven anything else. This car is like Ursula Andress. Other Bond girls have come and gone, but none have ever matched the moment when she stepped out of the sea wearing only a knife. However, unlike Ursula, the DB5 still looks fresh today. Its styling hasn’t dated at all.

Of course, everything else has. The headlamps were made by Lucas, otherwise known as the Prince of Darkness. The original gearbox, used up to chassis No. 1,340, was from a tractor, and don’t think the five-speed ZF replacement had any better genes. It was from a lorry.

Power? Well, Aston said the 4-litre straight-six engine would deliver 282bhp, although how they arrived at this figure is unclear, since their own factory test-bed recorded just 242bhp. Hot hatchback stuff these days.

I drove a DB5 recently, and I simply couldn't believe how antiquated it felt. As I’ve said many times, classic cars can’t be any good or they'd still be in production today. It was heavy and ponderous. And yet, when I saw Bond use his DB5 to take on a Ferrari 355 in GoldenEye, I didn’t scoff. Of course he was able to keep up. He was Bond. The only man alive who understands the rules of baccarat.

And if Q was able to fit a Martin-Baker ejector seat into a car without arousing the suspicion of an unwanted passenger, then how do we know the DB5 in question hadn’t been fitted with retro-fit nitrous injection? When you look at what these special-effects boys did to the Vanquish, and hear how they turned an AC Cobra into a BMW Z8—as BMW wasn't able to supply the real thing on time—anything is possible.

Well, not anything. Bond was not allowed to actually beat the 355. Contractually speaking, Ferrari was most insistent on that point. I’ve watched that chase sequence many times with my son, who’s six, and he doesn't know that in real life the Ferrari would eat Bond’s Aston for breakfast. So far as he’s concerned, 007 is driving very quickly down a hill in a very fast car that could very easily have been made yesterday. He even has a picture of a DB5 on his bedroom wall, and he likes it more than a McLaren F1.

It’s hard to think of any other car that could have bridged the generation gap so effectively. An E-type Jaguar was faster, and much nicer to drive, than the Aston. And it still looks fresh today, but it’s too common, and a tad too sporty. So what about a Bentley? Nope. Too large, too scrap-metal-dealy. And, obviously, the usual suspects from Italy are out of the question for being too foreign. Perhaps a TVR, then. They’ve always been fast, and their sportiness is tempered with a healthy dollop of gentleman’s relish. But the simple fact of the matter is this: James Bond does not drive a plastic car.

Bond only drove his silver-birch Aston for 13 minutes. But a quarter of the world’s population saw him do it. And as a result, they know. 007 drives a DB5.

 ***

Bum steers

Would you buy a second-hand motor from 007? not only does he push cars to their limits—he often achieves the impossible. Jeremy Clarkson chooses 10 unlikely auto stunts

GOLDENEYE - THE TANK

Plainly, it is not possible to power-slide a tank. I know this because I have driven one. If you apply the brakes suddenly, your face smashes into something hard and metal. If you stop one of the tracks, your face smashes into something hard and metal. And no, tanks do not have handbrakes—which means it is also not possible to do a handbrake turn. So when we saw that tank sliding sideways through the streets of St. Petersburg we knew, for sure, that it was a cardboard tank-shaped body that had been nailed onto something like a BMW 330i. Wrong. It was a real tank, a Soviet T-54 that had been fitted with bigger armour, a bigger gun and the rubber tracks from a British tank so that it looked like a more modern T-72. One of the special-effects people, Andy Smith, explained that it had to look like a T-72 because Bond baddies “have all the latest gear”. Fine. So how do you make a tank slide like that? What trickery did you use? “Er, none,” he explains. “You just drive very fast, then brake one of the tracks and it slides.”

So there you are. The greatest, most implausible stunt of them all... and it was all done for real.

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER - THE FORD MUSTANG

Bond drove the Mustang Mach 1 down an alleyway on two wheels, and emerged on the other side on the other two wheels. I have no clue how he did this; more to the point, nor do I understand how he managed to get from one side of Las Vegas to the other without running out of petrol. The Mach 1, remember, could run Saudi Arabia dry from a range of 400 paces. And let’s not forget that Saudi Arabia ran the Mach 1 dry in the oil crisis of 1973. Despite Bond's patronage, this car withered on the vine. And died.

TOMORROW NEVER DIES - THE BMW 750 

Ooh, I bet BMW was pleased. It went to all the trouble and expense of securing a three-film deal with the Bond people. It provided 22 £50,000 cars for Tomorrow Never Dies, and Q—the greatest, most knowledgable technician in the world—having seen in the script it was called a 750, promptly referred to it on camera as a “BMW seven hundred and fifty”. Not until Robert De Niro pronounced Hereford as it’s spelt in Ronin had we ever heard such a gaffe. Still, the car itself was remarkable. Fully capable of being driven by remote control (and I know this to be possible because I built a Corvette that could be driven from afar—well, who wants to actually drive a Corvette?), it also had a wire cutter that sprang out of the badge on the bonnet. Handy, since three minutes into the chase in Brent Cross car park, Bond did indeed need to cut through some steel cable. To incapacitate the pursuers, nails were dropped from the rear of the car—a feature that was fitted to the DB5 in Goldfinger, though it was never actually deployed back then, in case small boys tried the same thing for real. In addition, the BMW had self-inflating tyres, electrified door handles to scare away thieves, sledgehammer-proof glass, and a battery of missiles in the sunroof. As gadget cars go, it was way beyond the DB5. But it was a BMW saloon car. And BMW saloon cars are driven by German cement salesmen. Not James Bond. So it wasn’t the implausibility of the chase that wrecked this for me. It was the implausibility of the car.

OCTOPUSSY - THE RICKSHAW

In India, might is right. The truck is the biggest thing on the road and therefore has right of way over the elephant, which has right of way over the bus, which has right over way over the van, which has right of way over the car, which has right of way over the pedestrian, which has right of way over the dung beetle, which has right of way over the auto rickshaw. Of the 164 people killed every day on the highways and byways of India, nobody knows how many die at the wheel of their three-wheeled scooter. Nobody cares. I drove one once and simply couldn’t work out how anyone could ever make it go fast enough to be dangerous. Of all the vehicles in all the world, this is the most horrid. And not even Bond gives it any kudos. He used one to escape from the baddies in Octopussy. But do you know what? He’d have been better off on his hands and knees.

OCTOPUSSY - THE ALFA ROMEO GTV6

I apologise if you sat near me in the cinema when I saw this. I don’t normally scoff so loudly, but the notion that a GTV6 can outrun the German police in their BMWs is preposterous. I owned a GTV6 at the time, so let me tell you, it’s impossible—not hard: impossible—to change from first to second gear. The problem is that Alfa wanted its sporting coupe to have perfect weight distribution, so the gearbox was put at the back. Nothing wrong with that. But they linked it to the lever with a series of rods that operated with the smoothness of a washing machine full of bricks. Once, in my car, these rods detached themselves and played tonsil hockey with the prop shaft. It went from 100mph to 0 in 2.4 inches, and the sparks put the explosion at the end of Dr. No in the shade. Also, the car would let all the air out of its tyres overnight, refuse to disengage the clutch, and not start if it was hot, cold, wet, dry or overcast. Any agent who relied on a GTV6 would be shot on his first morning.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS - THE ASTON MARTIN V8

When Bond loses a tyre driving on a frozen lake, skis come out of the sills, and spikes shoot out of the tyres. Even if we allow for the problem of running electrical cable to the inside of a tyre, how did the spikes come through the rubber without letting the air out? We must deduce that the tyres were in fact solid. So he drove all the way from London to Bratislava with solid tyres, did he? Well, I suppose he did get past customs with missiles hidden in his bumper...

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH - THE BMW Z8

It wasn’t a Z8. BMW did everything that was humanly possible to supply the real thing in time for the film, but in the end, all it could come up with was a selection of body panels. These were bolted onto a Dax Cobra, a sort of AC replica, and from a distance nobody was any the wiser. For close-up shots, a model was used. Happily, this half-arsed car was cut in half by a helicopter. Good.

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME - THE LOTUS ESPRIT

How did Lotus convince Bond to ditch the Aston? Simple. It parked one of its dramatic new Esprits near the canteen at Pinewood and waited for the call. In the chase, the car drove off a pier into the sea and became a submarine. Bond’s gorgeous passenger, a Russian agent, then operated one of the mines, saying she’d seen blueprints of the car. If she had, why did she scream when it plunged into the water? I suspect she knew ‘Lotus’ stands for Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious. A normal Esprit would struggle to get to the shops without exploding, so she would undoubtedly have been worried about how it performed as a submarine.

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY - THE CITROËN 2CV

After the excesses of Moonraker, in which James Bond revealed that he could not only move his eyebrows independently of one another, but also shoot down flying saucers from a space shuttle, the whole 007 story was brought down to Earth. For Your Eyes Only is a simple tale of Bond trying to get to a sunken British trawler before the Russians.

And with this new-found realism, it was obvious that he should have a gritty, no-nonsense car. So they put him a Citroën 2CV.

I’m sorry, but this simply didn’t wash. Had the story line been about saving a whale or disentangling the Greenham Common women from one another’s crotches, then maybe. But it’s really not a good idea to go up against the henchmen of a Cuban hit man armed only with a car that was made by a bunch of Algerians in a factory with a floor made out of mud.

Actually, I don’t know if the factory floor was made from mud, but I can tell you that Citron never allowed a single journalist in there. Getting access to Saddam’s bunkers would have been easier.

I didn’t like seeing this car on the road, and I certainly didn’t like to see it being used as a prop in such a great action movie. I want fantasy from my Bond films, not clown noises.

In the chase, Bond manages to shake off three pursuing Peugeot 504s—even the baddie cars were boring—and, I’m sorry, that’s simply not possible. You could put Michael Schumacher in a 2CV and he wouldn’t be able to get away from Ray Charles. Even if he was in a wheelbarrow, being pushed around by Roy Orbison.