It was only last year when I regaled CC with the coupé version of the Aston Martin V8 Zagato, thinking naively that there wouldn’t be an encore. Yet here we are, faced with the ever more exclusive convertible. And it’s British Week of ‘80s month (till the end of June, while stocks last), so I had little choice but to re-regale.
Quick recap, then: Aston Martin and Zagato go back a ways, but the V8 coupé was the first car the Italian coachbuilder made in double-digit quantities for the British marque. And it was only double-digits: only 52 coupés were made in 1986-87. But it was the go-go ‘80s, so they sold immediately, leading Aston and Zagato to devise a drop-top version as an immediate follow-up.
And so the V8 Zagato Volante was premiered at the 1987 Geneva Motor Show, though it was actually made from a coupé that had not yet been sold. Six months or so later, the Zagato Volante was in the Aston range. Another 36 cars were made, the final one only being completed in 1990.
There were a number of differences with the coupé. The most obvious one was the front end, which became an interesting venetian blind affair. Pretty radical. I distinctly recall seeing one of these up close when I lived in London back in the late ‘90s and wondering whether it was some weird one-off. One of 37, it turns out.
The back end did not see any changes compared to the coupé. But what was markedly different was the engine. When the coupé was made, the goal was to make the fastest Aston Martin ever. It made sense: the body was to be all aluminium panels, the chassis was shortened by a foot and the aerodynamics were pretty advanced, as per Zagato traditions.
The issue was the engine. The old 5.3 litre DOHC V8 still had a lot of life in it, but only when fed by four massive Weber carbs would it produce the 430hp required to reach the mythical 300kph max speed Aston Martin were aiming for. The problem was the Zagato’s low hood, which had to be deformed with a massive bulge to clear said Webers. Here’s a picture of the coupé’s engine – what a beast!
While we’re at it, here are a few extra pictures of the red coupé I wrote up last year, whose engine we just glanced at. That power bulge is not too bad from this angle, but in the metal it does add to the car’s oddity. And not necessarily in a good way.
The Volante’s hood is flat and lacking NACA inlets, though. Because it was deemed more of a cruiser (and it was a little heavier than the coupé anyway), Aston elected to fit it with the fuel-injected version of the V8, providing the rear wheels with 320hp. Quite a climbdown from the coupé, but hey, it sure looked better.
Zagato made 13 left-hand-drive cabriolets, of which nine were fitted with the ZF five-speed manual. Most of the RHD cars got the three-speed Torqueflite, apparently.
Oh course, this being the Magical Meiji Jingu Avenue of Automotive Wet Dreams, I was able to realize this shot of the two flavours of Aston V8 Zagatos. Take your pick – my personal preference goes to the drop-top, just because it’s the cleaner design of the two. Plus I don’t think 320hp could be termed as “not enough power” for a two-seater in any conceivable universe.
The enigmatic iron mask face is also part of the attraction, though it seems some Volantes were either produced with the coupé’s front end, or were converted later – possibly a bit of both. If the car was ordered that way, fair enough, it’s the client’s aesthetic choice and I’m sure Zagato were eager to please. But those venetian blinds give the Volante an air of mystery, as opposed to the coupé’s just-plain-weird face.
Finding one is tricky enough, but affording it is another matter. Back when these were (hand)made, they retailed at $175k, which is a nice chunk of change. And nowadays, the price of admission seems to sit around the $200-300k area, so they haven’t really depreciated too much. Rowan Atkinson’s (a.k.a Mr Bean) famous coupé, modified by Aston themselves to race spec, fetched over £250k a decade ago. I think I’ll stick to Minis.
Related post:
Curbside Classic: 1986 Aston Martin V8 Vantage Coupé by Zagato – Lightweight Unobtainium Brick, by T87
I knew there had to be a reason to get out of bed this morning and sure enough, here we go. You’re going to cause me to unearth all of my late 80’s CAR magazine stash remnants this week and just lay on the carpet surrounded by them as if I was 12…
I didn’t recall offhand that the front end was so different from the coupe, I can’t say I dislike this one at all, but then I am also very partial to the 1986 Toyota Celica which seems to have inspired this at least in part, with what looks like a sort of translucent plastic with a dark underlay, at least in pictures.
The mind though, it is thoroughly boggled when presented with as you said the magic that both of the variants were placed together in closer proximity than perhaps at any point prior outside of Newport Pagnell or a Geneva Auto Show. I’m sure you were again faced with the conundrum of racing across the street to capture evidence yet leaving behind something else just as if not even more magical that poof! may be gone once you turned around again.
One can certainly quibble with aspects of both shapes but if balanced against the fact that these are almost 40-year-old creations that were the height of modernity (externally at least) never mind looking like from another dimension in regard to A-Ms other offerings at the time, they are very agreeable. I think they hold their own refreshingly well against A-Ms current lineup as well, no matter how much I enjoy those, albeit increasingly concerned (as if my concerns matter a whit) that most of the last 30 or so years has had virtually the exact same shape presented as (to differing degree) distinct offerings. Not something that a lot of 1980s designs can necessarily claim.
Most interestingly though, with the low front 3/4 angle front shots, the red car really puts me in mind of some of Zagato’s 60s/70s creations with the bulging/prominent headlights, while the gray car presents as far more completely different than mostly a fascia change would have me think was possible.
In the end if presented with the opportunity I suppose i could spend all day trying to decide which was better when the best option would of course just be to to get in and drive the thing. Either of them, or better yet, both of them.
Bloody bellissimo is what they are. I may need a moment to myself, thank you…
My mileage varies just ever so slightly from yours (below), though I do agree that the shape of Astons, pleasant as it is, grows a bit wearisome after 30 years, so I suppose it was good that some variation on older themes was at least tried – it’s just that in my mileage variation, Zagato failed entirely, whereas in yours, they could not have succeeded more. One of us is, of course, wrong, and whilst $250k says that that person may be your current interlocutor, that selfsame person will allow only that it is not he but rather the recipient of this enwisening missive.
Well, much is said about the eye of the beholder and I’ll point out that while the sun is currently rising where I sit (literally I mean, figuratives may be a different matter…), the same sun has set for you. It’s difficult to see in the darkness, the same darkness that was Aston in 1985 or so with an aged “supercar” that if you squint hard enough looks more than a little like a Mustang II without Farrah on the hood and of course the Lagonda, which I was staggered to just realize soldiered on until 1990 or so.
Yet Zagato brutally yanked this here shape out of their hat and set the world (okay, at least the small world leafing through the British Automotive Press at the newsstand) agog with a shape that was well worthy of discussion and my own fawning. Of course opinions can differ, and while many may present (always their own, I’ll note) opinion as fact, it nevertheless heralded a bit of a new dawn at Aston. A few years hence, elements from this (well, more the coupe version and mostly the front end) found themselves referenced in the new Virage, which I’ll admit looked more than a bit cobbled together and somehow on tippy toes, yet became a bit of a stepping stone to the eventual pairing with the entry level DB7, which then at least visually spawned pretty much everything else we know at the company including the Vanquish which replaced that Virage in a sort of automotive hop-scotch. Or at least that’s how I interpret it and remember, it’s getting light outside where I sit. I think they needed the external design “reset” of this car; and perhaps to some it spoke of a need to wash out the collective eye, to others it gave the impetus to boldly move on from the excesses of the 1970, an emphatic turning of the page if you will, even though much of the rest of the world had already done so years prior. Things like change move more slowly in English villages, at least until one fires up the engine, then some things move remarkably quickly there..
And, by golly, if Aston had rejected this, it may have ended up with an Alfa badge instead and the next product out of the house of Zagato was the SZ, which I also adore for its own version of design chutzpah, but realize that trying to slap an Aston badge on that and wedge the V8 into the front would cause the earth to stop spinning and drop straight down out of frame as in a cartoon.
A pleasure, as always!
Alfa SZ, eh? Duly noted. Next week will be reserved for a museum visit, but let’s see when I can schedule Italian ’80s Week sometime in June.
Laughing with gusto at you reply, Mr K! From in the dark, too. Don’t agree, of course, other than that the Lagonda outlived its childish arrival the day after it arrived.
Alfa SZ? Love it (which is admittedly a bit contrary). No kit-car maker would’ve been game, and anyway, the cheek suited the Alfa brand. Badged ala Aston, it might not’ve been, shall we say, driven by Bond.
Oh, no, please, the pleasure is all mine.
Venetian blind headlight covers…are these simply a molded plastic panel with horizontal recesses that mimic a closed blind, or are the headlights actually hidden behind multiple operable slats? if the latter, i would really like to see an image of one of these with the blinds open and illumination beaming through.
WOOF! What a set of wheels!
Mr Tatra always finds the most exquistely weird and rare iron. Its an impressive talent!
In this Aston Martins case, rare doesnt equal beautiful. Its very brutalist in its style, the convertible especially looks very 80s dystoptian sc fi.
Either one in black would be the weekend ride of choice for the meglomanical defense contractor CEO. Of course he’d be chauffered around in the back of his 6000 SUX during the week, yakking on that motorolla bag cell phone.
The convertible reminds me of an ’86 Toronado front end; although the engine would be significantly different.
I liked the ’86 Toro very much…except for the weakling engine.
Nice find, they dont get much rarer than that.
Rare find!! But both among the uglier Astons ever made imo, blandness bordering on boring. For their current value I can think of a lot of other exotics I’d much prefer, starting with a Mangusta.
Thanks to the incredible instantaneous accessibility of the internet, to tap imagery of virtually any car…
If a car is genuine uniquely-styled, and somewhat attractive, however rare, it will be discussed and highlighted in discussions on the net.
If a car is generally forgotten, its usually not a coincidence.
It’s interesting Citroen and Zagato both did similar side mirrors: the Aston’s resemble those of the XM.
It also has a plastic nose cone. I wonder did a designer or modeller move from Citroen who would have finished design work in 1985 or 86?
“Enigmatic iron mask”? The old swashbuckler isn’t called the Man In The Venetian Blind, you know, though this ’80’s bilge might as well have been, as it looks like something that fell through a window. Or a shredder. Or out of a kid’s paste-it book. The coupe just looks like a 2nd gen Nissan EXA, a generic ’80’s yawnster if ever there was, and the roofless one looks like some TVR wedgie wodge, only rounded off. From the moment these first appeared, I thought they shouldn’t have.
The Emperor, I tell you, has no clothes. (A very nice set of undies, by all accounts, but that’s moot). Actually, I don’t have have to say this: instead, look again at the positions of the good Tokyo folk caught in photo ten, left to right. One lady is on her phone, her friend is looking away and laughing. The dude in black t-shirt has his phone firmly held against him as he walks past: his mate gives the car sideways glance, the man behind that looks straight ahead. And the ones behind that? One is looking the other way, the other is quite sensibly ogling a Mini. Not one has given it even a desultory version of the modern sign of the cross – a phone pic. I rest my case. As, apparently, did Zagato, long before they should have.
Aston in this era was replicating the familiar British aristocratic problem of having land but no capital. The basic engineering was mostly DBS vintage, as I recall, and not exactly on the bleeding edge at that time, but there wasn’t the scratch to really bring it up to date or to avoid the embarrassing odd bits of mass-market parts-bin rubbish. Because the cars were coachbuilt to begin with, they could get their pals at firms like Zagato to try to dazzle onlookers with this kind of dress-up and just soak the handful of actual punters for the design costs, and since they were selling few enough cars to slip through some type approval loopholes in the UK and Europe at the time, they could warm up the old V-8 with extra Webers or a rortier exhaust, but actually developing a new modern platform would have involved the old “c” word. So, you had the upper-crust equivalent of that guy with seemingly unlimited budget for wings, body kits, wheels, and engine mods, but all applied to the same slightly tatty 1988 Nissan, because no one is going to cosign his car loan.
Hehehe! Nicely put, and dead accurate.
I had to look up the EXA and then realized it’s what we know here as the Pulsar NX. Then I had to recheck it all as I cannot see the parallel. But I feel good and perhaps vindicated about my own opinion now.
The actions of a few timid and harried Japanese Salarymen on their way to lunch on the sidewalk are no true measure of a design’s greatness. You left out the fellow looking the wrong way while dodging the out of frame tour bus to dash across the street in picture #5 to paparazzi the Aston in picture #2. A true believer, an enlightened mensch if there ever was one.
The man in picture 12 with his hands clasped as he walks earnestly and approvingly behind the car knows you don’t take pictures of greatnesss, it’s rude, you wouldn’t pester the pope for a selfie upon first encounter now would you? It’s like that.
And the fellow in the last picture is clearly the owner checking the latest Sotheby’s results as he realizes the red car appearing has made his own car appear all too common and yes, popular.
After all, on that day there were (two, but seemingly infinitely) more Aston Martin Zagatos on the street than Nissan Pulsar NXs. People know to hold on to a good thing.
But lastly and more importantly, God bless the Japanese, who are sensible enough to actually share their baubles with us on a random public street instead of just leaving them hidden away like the gimp in Pulp Fiction for only themselves to, uh, enjoy, as the rest of the world seems to do with theirs. There’s another 87 or so of these cars out there, when’s the last time anyone has seen any of them?
I have a 1986 Aston Martin brochure somewhere with an Autocar (I think) review of the Zagato coupé ticket in with a price list. Going to drag that out to see how it was described at the time for sure.