First glimpse at Aston Martin’s V12 Zagato

After taunting us with one annoyingly inconclusive shot, Aston’s finally come good with full-frontal pics of its V12 Vantage rebodied by Italian coachbuilder Zagato. It marks the 50th anniversary of the trouser-tightening 1961 DB4 Zagato and it’s being revealed at this weekend’s Villa D'Este Concours.

Not a lot’s happened mechanically, but Zagato’s gone to preposterous lengths to form that awesome body. Building the shell using machines wasn’t possible, so each aluminium design flourish was fabricated by hand from sheet metal before being grafted together to form a panel. The front wings alone are built in seven pieces.

The road car in the pics has been untouched. Its 6.0-litre V12 still produces 510bhp and 420lb ft of torque. But there’s a stickered-up enduro racer in the works, which will compete in the 2011 24-hour Nurburgring.

To create the outline, Zagato sculpted each section of the GT’s panels from sheet alloy using a contraption called an English wheel.
 
It’s a weird-looking c-on-its-side-shaped apparatus and it allows you to turn your sheet of flat metal into a smooth, rounded shape that follows two different curves.
 
Zagato also used old-school wooden bucks, which look like timber skeletons of the car. Over the course of several painstaking hours, metal’s carefully bent over it and tapped into shape using different shaped, sized and weighted hammers.
 
Both of which take years of training, steely patience and a brown store coat to operate successfully. We salute you, brave panel beaters. Now please make us a V12 GT.