This is the car, serial number 163, and Peter Ustinov's was serial number 161!
Stephan commented today on the Peter Ustinov post:
I owned a DB-4 Series I,
I got the Aston from my acquaintance Larry Rivers, the abstract painter, who had pretty much trashed it.
Traded him a nice BSA 650 and not a hell of a lot of money. The story gets better.
I had crashed the 650 and broke a lot of cooling fins on one cylinder, which I replaced myself, along with a new piston, though I really didn't know what I was doing.
When I drove the bike down to Rivers' Greenwich Village studio to deliver it, it began to overheat and seize up on me. In retrospect, I think I had neglected to properly size the piston-ring end gaps.
The next morning, Larry called. "Oh boy, there goes my Aston Martin," I thought.
No, Rivers said that the bike had been stolen overnight from outside his studio. He never even got to ride it. What a shame
One mistake I made: my car's serial number was indeed 161, but it was the engine s/n that was 163, not Ustinov's car. (Apparently, Aston had rejected two engines somewhere along the way, so the numbers didn't match.). I know Ustinov's car was close to mine--I was a member of the Aston Martin Owner's Club, which annually published a booklet of all the cars and their owners--but I'm no longer sure of its s/n. The mind is the second thing to go...
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