Only 600 miles sit on the odometer. Two hundred and fifty of those came from the recommissioning process to get the car road-ready again. This isn’t a restoration. You can’t restore something that was never used.
A 1990-registered Aston Martin V8 Vantage Zagato, one of just 50 coupes ever built, is now listed for sale through British specialist dealer Nicholas Mee. The car has passed through three owners since it was assigned a 1987 build slot, and none of them apparently saw much point in driving it.
That’s a strange fate for a car built to be driven hard. The V8 Vantage Zagato packed Aston Martin’s 5.3-liter V8 in its highest “X-pack” tune, producing 432 horsepower and 410 pound-feet of torque. At the time, no production Aston engine made more. The claimed top speed was 186 mph, a figure that would have put it among the fastest road cars in the world when it debuted.
The car itself was a product of the last era when Italian coachbuilders still did this kind of work. Aston Martin shipped complete Vantage chassis to Milan, where Zagato fitted mostly aluminum bodywork, flush-mounted glass, and a more aerodynamic shape that chopped roughly a foot off the standard car’s length without touching the wheelbase. Front and rear fascias were fiberglass. The rest was hand-formed metal.
Zagato’s 1980s output was a strange and wonderful trilogy. Alongside this Aston, the Milan shop also produced the Alfa Romeo SZ and the Lancia Hyena, both of them cars that favored angular drama over conventional beauty. The V8 Vantage Zagato fit that pattern perfectly. It looked nothing like the voluptuous, double-bubble DB4GT Zagato from the 1960s. It looked like it was designed on a drafting table using only a T-square and a triangle, which it probably was.
First shown in concept form at the 1985 Geneva Motor Show, the coupe entered production in 1987. Fifty coupes and 37 Volante convertibles were built, plus two prototypes. The gap between this car’s build slot and its 1990 registration suggests either Zagato’s famously leisurely build pace or a market that had cooled from the speculative frenzy of the mid-1980s, when buyers were placing orders on cars they’d never seen finished.
Aston Martin and Zagato still collaborate today, but their recent partnerships have been more restrained. Modern Zagato editions tend to add styling tweaks rather than wholesale body replacements. The 1987 coupe belongs to a more audacious time, when a coachbuilder could tear the skin off an Aston Martin and replace it with something that split opinion right down the middle.
Nicholas Mee hasn’t published an asking price, which in this corner of the collector market usually means the number is large enough to warrant a private conversation. Comparable V8 Vantage Zagatos with actual mileage have traded in the $400,000 to $600,000 range in recent years. A car with 350 genuine miles on it, essentially a factory-fresh example sitting in a 38-year-old body, exists in its own category.
Three owners, almost four decades, and nobody drove the thing. Someone will buy it now and face the same question the previous three couldn’t answer.
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