December is a month of reflection, a time when people look back on the year that has passed, sometimes with rose-tinted nostalgia and sometimes with sobbing melancholy. At Aston Martin, the spirit of introspection has bitten hard?although with some distant coordinates programmed into the corporate time machine. Because the British company has announced it’s going to produce a ?continuation? version of the DB4 GT, a car that was first introduced back in 1959.
Aston isn?t the first manufacturer to reissue one of its classics; Jaguar produced six lightweight E-types using chassis numbers that were issued but never used in period and is now doing nine XKSS roadsters. Various other low-volume models have been put back into ultra-limited production, including the Shelby Cobra and the DeLorean. But the DB4 GT is perhaps the most ambitious such project yet, with Aston announcing that it plans to produce 25 “lightweight” GTs. Only 75 cars were produced during the original run, of which only eight were the stripped-out lightweights. Yet, as tends to be the case with limited-edition Aston models, all have already been sold, despite a price of $1.9 million at current exchange rates. Then again, that’s still only about half what original DB4 GTs are selling for.
The new cars will be made in exactly the same way as the originals, with thin-gauge aluminum panels fitted over a tubular frame. Power will come from a straight-six engine with twin spark plugs per cyl...