Features

Most sports car designers say their machines are aggressive, and so I used the word in connection with the DBS. Oops. "This car isn't aggressive," insists Marek Reichman, Aston Martin's design director, slightly forlornly.

So what exactly is it, this wide and low visual maelstrom of lumps, bumps, grilles, inlets, exits and general car-design swagger? "It's fit for purpose. It's based on the DB9 but the DB9 is above all elegant and this is muscular. This is as far as we'd want to push it. It hints at the potential for driving performance."

At the moment, hinting is all it's allowed to do. The car you're looking at is James Bond's Aston Martin DBS. The hardware star of Casino Royale, the preferred mount of Daniel Craig's 007.

But the car you're looking at is not the new Aston DBS, the production car to be launched at the Geneva motor show in March, ready to go on sale towards the end of 2007. And this increased performance is something Aston steadfastly refuses to be pinned down about.

There are no specs for Bond's car, and nothing official at all about the production car, beyond the fact that it will eventually exist. But clearly it's not going to be any kind of weakling.

The regular DB9 makes 450bhp from its six-litre V12, but the related engine in the Vanquish S turns out 520. A number to which the adjective 'purposeful' might reasonably be applied.

If I read Reichman right, that's pretty much the kind of purpose his DBS is fit for. The timing of Casino Royale was, from Aston's point of view, just slightly wrong, its release date being four months too soon to be used as a showcase for the production DBS.

But in Daniel Craig's portrayal of Bond, the film was exactly right for the DBS. Craig's Bond doesn't camp it up in the Moore mould, and if he's as much of a looker as Brosnan he isn't especially suave despite the dinner suit.

He's hard. Clearly being 007 means you can't be aggressive, but if Craig's Bond had to cut off some villain's head with a length of cheese wire, he'd get on with it. And look said baddie in the eye while he was at it.

Which is why the DBS seemed exactly right. Craig visited Aston almost before the product-placement deal's ink was dry. He saw the car in its early stages, and drove the prototype, too. Reichmann and he spent time together and the thing just seemed to fit.