Here's what happened at Bonhams' Aston Martin Sale

Last weekend’s Bonhams Aston Martin Sale was an auction of oddities, with the headline car failing to sell – despite a bid of £5million – while other cars whipped bidders into a mild frenzy.

TG was there to watch the action unfold, and we can’t recommend visiting an auction highly enough. Even if you haven’t got the requisite funds to bid. It can be as interesting as actual motorsport, watching the winning bid fly back and forth like the ball in a fevered tennis rally.

Much of the entertainment comes via the auctioneer himself. Jamie Knight is something of a Bonhams icon, his natural wit while conducting the bids no doubt extracting maximum money from those bidding, while enthralling everyone else.

But Knight’s knowledge of regular customers – crucially remembering their names, involving them in his dialogue – surely evokes real loyalty. His balancing of phone, online and in-the-room bidders is also a sight to behold.

So allow us to walk you through the big stories of the Bonhams Aston Martin Sale 2016.

TG’s favourite lot was also one of the biggest hitters, selling comfortably above its £320,000-420,000 estimate. It’s not the oil painting its modern day namesake is, but it’s arguably as desirable. This was a 200mph car when such things were rare, a 600bhp brute when such power wasn’t coming out of AMG Mercs.

Alright, half a million quid could buy an awful lot – new Ford GT included. But then there’s an awful lot of car here too – the stately old Vantage weighs two tons and is almost as long as a Land Rover Discovery. And in a world of paddleshift hybrid hypercars, there’s something wonderfully old fashioned about a wilfully stocky, 600bhp manual brute.

The hammer went down at £5million, a figure which, in the words of Jamie Knight, is “going cheap”. And so it transpires this pretty little DB3S racer did not sell, failing to meet its reserve with a £6-7million estimate applied to it.

The car itself appears to be a proper little treat, with Sirs David Brown and Stirling Moss on its roster of previous drivers, a full Aston Martin Works restoration in 2014 and Mille Miglia eligibility thanks to its age. None of these were enough to ensure a sale, however, after a tense bidding procedure in front of a packed room.

“It’s been through several restorers, wouldn’t want that,” murmured one auction-goer perched near TG. “All the salt on Scotland’s roads? I wouldn’t touch it,” retorted another.

The DB5 whose name they were besmirching was attracting bid after bid as they spoke, eventually selling for over £800,000 once auction fees had been applied, putting it bang in the middle of its £750,000-850,000 estimate.

Fetching exactly the same amount was a DB5 coupe, this one way over its £450,000-550,000 estimate.

The DB5 in question has a Vantage power upgrade – one of 65 thus-equipped with 314bhp the result – and it garnered an enormous sum despite its 100,000 miles and ‘generally good’ condition, faint praise surely in an auction of cars like this. Lovely spec though, eh?

The murmurings of auction-goers as lots appeared were a good insight unto the ruthless world of buying cars as investments. And a good exemplar of bidders’ concerns is this Lagonda’s failure to sell.

When the auction catalogue landed at TG a couple of weeks ago, we fawned over this car. Walking around the cars before the auction, it was utterly beguiling and impossible not to coo over. It’s a car lover’s car, an absurd one-off that’s rich in character.

Unfortunately that also makes it difficult to value and a purchase entirely dictated by the heart; the final £170,000 bid fell £30,000 short of estimate.

A Lagonda that faired much better was this fifties convertible. In the grand scheme of the auction, an £89k price tag is not ginormous. But when a car is estimated to fetch £25,000-35,000, it’s more significant.

This is a car in need of restoration and “sold strictly as viewed”. But it is also a car once used by a certain Mr Fangio. Quite what effect this had on the bidding hysteria that saw the car treble its own estimate we can only speculate upon.

Indeed, it appears the 2016 Aston Martin Sale crowd are not shy of heavily restoring a car.

This rather shabby DB6 is about as ‘barn find’ as cars get, having not been touched for 25 years and offered explicitly as “well weathered” and “for restoration” by the auction company. Nonetheless, it sold for nearly £40k more than a brand new DB11.

The former fastest convertible in the world, no less. It just made its estimate, bids not initially forthcoming. Enter auctioneer Knight, glancing across to a loyal bidder. “Fancy it?” he quipped. “I’ve already got one!” was the reply. “Fancy another?!” was his whimsical response.

The car itself was a bit of a guilty pleasure when TG first leafed through the catalogue. It is as far from the svelte, subtle beauty of a DB9 as it’s possible to get. But what could be more ‘80s than a completely bluff, overpowered convertible in a weird metallic brown? We envy its new owner more than we care to admit.

Reaching bang in the middle of its estimate was this, not even half a mk1 Aston Vanquish. It was a prop on the launch event of the Vanquish back at the turn of the century, and entered the sale with the potential to be some very space-consuming art in the home of an Aston aficionado.

It left the sale to a round of applause, though. Not because it’s a pricey way to buy a paperweight, rather because a unique and intriguing piece of history was sold to the Aston Martin Heritage Trust. A very worthy recipient who’ll surely get the very most of it.

We end on another immovable object, a 1:1 scale mock up of the now £2 million One-77. It was expected to fetch as much as £35,000 but didn’t even reach a third of that.

But then what would you do with it? It may have actual wheels, but weighing as much as a real car, it’s not something you’ll be wantonly pushing around. Still looks lovely, though.