IN THIS FEATURE Lusting after the Lagonda Lady Penelope's car William Towns DBS An instant hit Driving one today As speeds increase, so does refinement Buying one second-hand Smirks among the cognoscenti

Towns saw the Italian (Touring of Milan) proposals for the DBS and thought they were awful too. He immediately set about doing his own version. David Brown liked the designs and, since Touring had gone out of business by then, decided to go ahead with the cars.

'Suddenly, without ever having to commit myself to a seat, I was a stylist again.' The first DBS was running in May 1967, with the cars at the Motor Show in October.

Towns then became a freelance, working for the likes of Jensen and Triumph but, apart than the DBS, his most famous creation was easily the 1976 Aston Martin Lagonda.

The car started out as private commission from an Aston dealer with stocks of unsold Aston Martin V8s that he wanted to have reskinned.

'I sat down and did some sketches and tried to work out how to revise the car without changing any of the structures,' Towns told me in 1992.

Eventually he thought better of the idea - it seemed silly to hack all those finished cars around - 'but I suggested the idea to Aston... and was asked to develop it into a new Lagonda that had to be ready by October for the show.'