St Athan, South Wales – Now that Aston Martin has officially taken over the three huge aircraft maintenance hangars at what used to be the RAF’s biggest station as its second UK manufacturing plant, the whole place is deserted, awaiting the set-up of the production line for the new DBX.
All that’s there, in fact, are 28 classic Aston Martins from its Heritage Collection, worth a total of more than R1 billion, and some security staff – and acres of concrete floors, freshly painted in official Ministry of Defence grey.
The set-up was just begging for the cars to mark their new territory in the way sports-cars – of whatever era – do best, so chief engineer Matt Becker took works endurance racers Darren Turner and Nicki Thiim (and a camera crew, luckily for us) down there to do just that.
The result is almost seven minutes of schoolboy mayhem – drifting, sliding and spinning some of the world’s most irreplaceable classic vehicles, inside the hangars and outside on the aprons, until they’re interrupted by ‘The Boss’, Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer, and hurriedly disappear, leaving the security staff to explain the tyre marks on the once-pristine hangar floors.