Supercharged Racing Two-Seater Aston Martin

THE CAR

Every marque has a beginning, and few are as thinly populated as Aston Martin's. Only a handful of Bamford & Martin cars survive in any form from the marque's first years. This is one of them: car number 1954, a 1½-litre side-valve of 1925, recognised by both the Aston Martin Owners' Club and the Aston Martin Heritage Trust. Rebuilt with great patience — and unusual honesty — around its surviving original components, and newly clothed in the unmistakable boat-tail of the 1922 Strasbourg team cars, it is that rare thing: an Aston from the very first chapter of the story that can be driven, hard and happily, today.

ONE OF THE FIRST ASTON MARTINS

Car number 1954 was built by Bamford & Martin Ltd in 1925 as a standard 1½-litre side-valve — in the earliest Aston Martin idiom, when chassis and engine shared a single number and each car was almost entirely made by hand. Its original body style is not recorded. The car appears, listed simply as 'in stock', in the celebrated 1926 letter from G. L. Francis & Co to Lionel Martin, written when Martin asked his agents for a list of surviving owners; before that it had belonged to F. Cook, who sold it to Francis. It surfaces again in the Aston Martin Works records of 1931–33 — noted there, endearingly, as '1954 Old A.M.' — receiving attention to its front and rear axles and repairs following an accident.

DECLINE AND RESCUE

By the 1950s the car had passed to Brian Hart and fallen into poor condition, its chassis by then badly rusted. In the 1980s it was acquired by Stan Milton-White, who also owned chassis 1925 — the last of the Works Brooklands racers — and who took 1954 essentially as a source of spares for that car's restoration, carried out at Morntane Engineering and Ecurie Bertelli by Andy Bell. A few of 1954's better parts were used in 1925; the rest was carefully set aside. In 2005 the remains — a collection of original components, together with new chassis side-rails fabricated in 2004 and married to the original cross-members — passed to Andy Bell, and the long work of bringing 1954 back began.

A REBUILD WITH A PEDIGREE OF PARTS

What makes this car unusual is not merely that it was rebuilt, but what it was rebuilt from. Among the parts that came with it was a narrow racing radiator, discovered by Milton-White and still bearing traces of its original black paint — believed to be the sole surviving component of chassis 1950, the 'Swiss Car', a 16-valve twin-cam 'Super Sports' and itself a Works replica of the Strasbourg racers. During the rebuild it was further established that the engine crankcase and the close-ratio gearbox were those of chassis 1925, the last Works Brooklands racer. To these were added a great many further original parts gathered over twenty years, and a considered programme of new manufacture where nothing sound survived: four brake drums and eight shoes, a differential centre casing, crown wheel and pinion, steering-box worm and sector, front and rear hubs, and five beaded-edge wheels and tyres. The rear axle and gearbox were rebuilt entirely, with new bearings and seals throughout.

ENGINE

The engine was built and tested by Ian Webber of T. I. K. Engineering in Fareham — an acknowledged master of these early Aston units, who had already rebuilt three side-valve and two 16-valve racing engines for Morntane Engineering and Ecurie Bertelli. On the original 1925 crankcase he fitted a new cylinder block, a new billet crankshaft, new Carrillo-type connecting rods, new high-compression domed pistons, and a full set of new timing gears, camshaft and valve gear. A few sympathetic modern touches — camshaft thrust washers, main-bearing oil-feed pipes — were incorporated purely for reliability. Installed in the chassis, the engine was coupled to a Centric supercharger, rebuilt by Derrick Chinn: the result is an early Aston with genuinely lively performance, matched to the excellent handling and braking for which these light, well-balanced cars have always been admired.

COACHWORK

The body is a new ash frame patterned faithfully on the 1922 Strasbourg team cars, made by Nick Jarvis — a coachbuilder who had built at least two such bodies before and knew Bamford & Martin cars intimately — and panelled in aircraft-specification 14-gauge aluminium by Andy Bell. Left in bare, hand-finished alloy over a deep red interior, it has the purposeful, unadorned look of a works racer, and every rivet and radius is correct.

THE CAR TODAY

The rebuild was completed in 2025 and the finished car tested at Mondello Park. It is, in the fullest sense, a hundred-year-old Aston Martin that behaves like a new one: quick, taut and utterly usable, yet honest in every detail about what it is and how it came to be. As one of the first Aston Martins of all — and one of very few from that era in genuinely driveable order — it is eligible for the most rewarding VSCC and pre-war events, and equally at home on the open road. Presented with a full history file documenting its origins, its long recovery and every stage of the rebuild, car number 1954 is a chance to own the very beginning of Aston Martin — well worth a look and a drive, and unlikely to be available for long.