James Bond Aston martin DB5 - Sold for £2.9 millionThe James Bond Aston Martin DB5 – one of two DB5s supplied to EON – has fetched £2.9 million at R.M. Auctions London sale.Back in June we reported that R.M. Auctions were to sell the James Bond Aston Martin DB5 in London this month, the first time the Goldfinger and Thunderball car had been for sale since it was bought from Aston Martin in the 1960s by Jerry Lee, an American DJ/Presenter, who paid the princely sum of just $12,000 for the iconic car.
And so iconic is the car that RM expected the DB5 to fetch in the region of $5 million when it went under the hammer last night, but it ended up fetching just short of estimates at £2,912,000 ($4,608,500), which included a 12% buyers premium.
The new owner is American businessman Harry Yeaggy who said “This is a car that I’ve always wanted, after all it is the most famous car in the world. My plan is to display it in my private car museum in Ohio just as it is.” Just what we’d all do.
Former owner Jerry Lee plans to use the not inconsiderable proceeds from the sale of the Jerry Lee DB5 to fund the Jerry Lee Foundation and in particular the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania and the Jerry Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology at the University of Cambridge. All very noble. All very eponymous.
RM has had a summer of fun with the DB5 and managed to eke out every ounce of publicity possible. As a result of the commercial tie-ups they conjured up to give the DB5 sale some column inches, the new owner gets to have a suit made by Gieves & Hawkes (bespoke tailors to Bond, don’t you know) with material woven with solid gold thread, and a seven night stay for ten guests at The Golden Eye Resort in Jamaica, Ian Fleming’s former home and where he wrote the Bond books.
As far as we know – and we may well be wrong – this car was in fact the car that EON used for publicity, rather than the car in the film. That hasn’t been heard of for more than forty years.
Wonder if it will now come out of the woodwork?
