BULLDOG & THE PUPPIES

We gather five motoring masterpieces by avant-garde designer William Towns - and drive all of them

- Mark Dixon

Over the last couple of years, it seemed you could hardly pick up a car magazine without seeing some reference to the Aston Martin Bulldog. It looked like what it was - an outlandish, impossibly wild concept hypercar from another age- and yet on 6 June 2023 it finally realised the 200mph top speed that had been envisioned for it more than 40 years ago.

Bulldog's owner is US collector and philanthropist Phillip Sarofim. Working closely with Richard Gauntlett, who is the son of former Aston Martin company owner Victor Gauntlett and who had spent thousands of hours researching the car and talking with former employees at the Newport Pagnell works, he negotiated its purchase after years of comparative neglect. Highly respected Shropshire restoration company CMC was commissioned to bring it back to authentic 1980 condition, and on that historic June day in 2023 it blasted all the way to 205.4mph in Aston Martin factory racer Darren Turner's hands.

It was truly a dream come true for Sarofim, a man with a passion for good design and a particular fondness for the British industrial designer William Towns, who died of cancer in 1993 at the tragically early age of 56. Today, Towns is best remembered for the 1967 Aston Martin DBS and the legendarily wedgy 1976 Aston Martin Lagonda, but he did so much more, as we profiled at length in Octane 234. During all the hoohah about the Bulldog's restoration, not many people knew that Sarofim had also quietly acquired four other significant Towns vehicles - the Minissima, Microdot, Hustler and Tracer - and had tasked CMC with restoring them, too.