Ring master: meet the man behind this stunning 1971 Aston Martin DBS restomod

Regular readers will be familiar with the Ring brothers, the ‘just the right amount of mad’ Wisconsin based tuners who started out as (and still run) an auto body shop... and then turned their attention to churning out the most unreal bespoke restomod builds.

We’ve been to visit them in their hometown of Spring Green before, but this time we intercepted one half of the duo, Mike Ring, at the Quail – a staple of Monterey Car Week – where they were unwittingly making Skoda’s lawyers a bit twitchy.

“We’ve combined the ferocity of American muscle with the stiff upper lip of English sophistication and motoring,” said Mike. “Octavia is beyond anything we’ve built before.” Welcome to the wildest incarnation of Aston Martin’s 1970s superhero. And not a medium sized Skoda. It is an old 1971 DBS classic stripped, stretched, beefed up and filled with five litres of pure American firepower.

Photography: Huck Mountain

How did it come about? Mike is typically and unashamedly honest. “The owner is a super cool, local guy. He said, ‘What do you guys want to build?’ We’ve always wanted to do a European car because Jim and I don’t know s*** about cars. I mean, we know American muscle, we grew up with it, but I can’t tell you about old cars and I can’t tell you about European cars.

"We literally Googled ‘European muscle car’ and a DBS was at the top and we’re like, yeah dude, we want to do James Bond.” This is an approach to project selection that we can very much relate to... same goes for Mike and Jim’s critical eye for car design.

“A week later the owner bought one off Bring a Trailer [Auctions]. It didn’t run, it was just sitting there waiting to die. We’d never seen one in our life and man they’re so flat sided, almost like they used it in a Bond movie and drove between houses and just kept that son of a b**** flat all the way through. Straight away we knew we had to put some booty on the back.”

And so they widened it by 10 inches, making it 82 inches (2,082mm) across at the rear and 78 (1,981mm) up front, which is there or thereabouts a Lamborghini Revuelto’s worth of girth. “But it still looks balanced,” Mike adds, and he’s not wrong. Probably because this wasn’t some rivet the arches and slap on the filler job, it’s all designed in CAD and made entirely in carbon fibre.

“From CAD to this was like, two and a half years. But from when we started getting the parts it took about a year.” As for the donor car? “We took all the parts off – doors, fenders – bonded it up and made a bar.” Mike nods towards the back of the stand where a barman stands behind a dissected DBS. “It’s a James Bond thing... we got to serve martinis.”

And what of the engine? A refettled version of the original 280bhp, 4.0-litre straight six? Not exactly... “We reached out to Aston early on and they said they just didn’t have the bandwidth to help right now. So since Ford had a relationship with Aston, we thought we’d run a Coyote in it. Supercharged. They run good, they sound good and we know them, right? The last thing we want to do is build something that we can’t make run. I mean, we are not engineers.”

It runs Ford’s 5.0-litre V8, matched to a 2.65-litre supercharger to provide 805 American horses. It’s hooked up to a six speed manual gearbox driving the rear wheels, and the entire drivetrain is packaged inside a custom chassis with the wheelbase stretched by 76mm over the original DBS. A structural roll cage is integrated into the body, there’s independent rear suspension, C7 Vette sway bars, Fox Racing dampers and Brembo brakes, so not as unsophisticated as Mike might have you believe.

It was designed by a chap called Gary Ragle, with “echoes” of William Townsend’s original buried in there somewhere. Ringbrothers said the aim was for “Coke bottle curvature”. Naturally the interior got just as much attention, being lavished with carbon fibre, stainless steel, leather and even a few cheeky nods to That Famous Spy who likes Astons – including a dipstick handle shaped like a martini glass.

Everything they touch is an extension of their passion and artistry, not a ploy to maximise profits

In terms of price for this one off, Mike wouldn’t be drawn, but you get the feeling that’s because he doesn’t actually know. Or care.

“We’re trying to sell another one so that we can spread the cost a bit for the owner... it was quite expensive. Even the exhaust tips we machined, that was $1,000 just for the chunk of stainless. My first quote for four pieces of glass was $92,000.

"Yeah, building bespoke has a cost, but honestly if I had to build the same car over and over, I wouldn’t be doing it because I would just lose interest. If it was all about money, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.”

It might not be a business model from any Harvard textbook, but that’s what makes the brothers so magnetic. Everything they touch is an extension of their passion and artistry, not a ploy to maximise profits. I ask Mike if he sees himself as an artist. “I don’t see myself as anything. I just see myself as lucky to be able to do this.

“And honestly, people go, when are you going to retire? I don’t want to retire. This is what I’d do if I was retired. I’m lucky to work with my wife, and my son’s now involved in the machining side. I just want to continue building cool stuff until I’m in the ground. Look, we’re not curing cancer, we’re just having fun.”