by Wallace Wyss –
Back when I was a barn finder, in the ’70s, I hung around the ritzy areas figuring, hey, if anybody has a car worth something it’s got to be, say, in the Hollywood Hills, Malibu or maybe Palos Verdes Peninsula.
I was right about the Peninsula as once I came across a Doctor there who displayed in his front courtyard a splendid example of both British engineering and Italian bodywork. He was lamenting that the top price he thought he could get for this model–of which only 19 were built–was but $25,000–less than a V12 Ferrari. Yet he felt since the car was a street car redesigned for racing with its own custom bodywork by one of Italy’s most storied design firms, it should be worth more. It fell into a class like the Ferrari 250GTO. I have seen one of the 36 (some say 39) GTOs that was only a street car, but Ferrari had wangled that lighter slimmer model into a production car class by claiming it was but a variation in bodywork on the already homologated short wheelbase 250GT.
The Aston came from a neck and neck battle between automakers Aston Martin and Ferrari. I don’t know the SN of the car I depicted, which may be another one from the one I was shown in Palos Verdes. But I am happy to report now, over 50 years later, they are multi million dollar cars, as I think they deserve to be since they are much rarer than say a short wheelbase Ferrari 250GT.
It’s a pity that Zagato just didn’t have the capacity to build more but there was no chance of Aston going up against Ferrari in quantity, not when Pininfarina had a much larger factory (though most Ferrari race cars were built by his in-house coachbuilder, Scaglietti).
The only thing against the Aston Martin DB4 GTZ design was that it had a rounded tail, and ironically the Aston pure racing car, the 214, had a chopped Kamm effect tail, better for aerodynamics (and I still say Pete Brock got the idea for that tail for the Shelby Cobra Daytona coupe by racing against a 214). The engine was an inline six 3.7-liters, aluminum block, twin-spark boasting a 9.7:1 compression ratio, higher than the standard DB4 GT engine.
Wallace Wyss Art – Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato
The engine was rated at 314 hp (234 kW), and had a 0 to 60 mph (97 km/h) acceleration of 6.1 seconds and a top speed of approximately 154 mph (248 km/h), which sadly was quite a bit short of the Ferrari 250GTO which could reach 170 mph.
One sold in 2023 for $14.3 million. Not anywhere near the price of a 250GTO, (rumored to be $70 million dollar plus car) but they sure surpassed the Doctor’s $25,000 guesstimate as value.
Playing with the build date are a plethora of replicas, the first set a quartet bodied by Zagato in 1988. With the approval of Aston Martin, four DB4 chassis were appropriately uprated to GT specifications, then sent to Zagato’s Milan workshop to be bodied like the originals. These cars would of course not be worth as much because they weren’t DB4 GTZ’s in the original time era.
And there were two spare body shells left over after producing the Sanction II so inevitably they got built, this time in 1992, with the permission of Aston Martin atop two old Aston Martin DB4s (chassis numbers DB4/344/R and DB4/424/R). In April 2019, Aston Martin started building a run of 19 more these using a 4.7-liter rated at 400 bhp. As a historian I am reviled by this tendency to muck about with history and I’m sure some buyer at an auction is going to get ripped off.
Let us know what you think in the Comments.
THE AUTHOR/ARTIST Wallace Wyss, painted this work on canvas. Inquiries on Wyss art can be directed to mendoart7@gmail.com
Simply an amazing painting Wallace