the LOCOMOTIVE

Tony Hunter had always wanted a Bond car-so he designed and built his own, based on the descriptions in lan Fleming's books

- Mark Dixon

'Вond had the most selfish car in England... She went like a bird and a bomb and Bond loved her more than all the women at present in his life rolled, if that were feasible, together.

Undoubtedly a petrolhead, then: that's how Ian Fleming introduces the car owned by his fictional creation James Bond in the 1961 novel, Thunderball; not a Silver Birch Aston Martin DB5 - which was a conceit of the movie makers - but a one-off Bentley Continental roadster. The Continental wasn't Bond's first Bentley by any means, but it's the one that appears most often in the books and it is the car now owned by Bond enthusiast Tony Hunter.

Of course, since Bond's Bentley was entirely fictional, the only way Tony could own it was to build it. Fortunately, he has been a professional car designer all his working life, beginning at Rover in 1990 and going on to work for a host of big-name marques - he conceived the interior of BMW's 'new' Mini - before ending up as head of interior design-production for Tata and his current freelance role as a design consultant. He's been a Bond fan for even longer.

'I was really into the books when I was a kid, and there was something in the relationship that Bond had with his car that made me want to feel the same way about the car in my life,' he explains. At first I thought that I'd just get a Bentley, and that would make me feel like James Bond. So I tried R-Types, and S1s and even T-series cars, but none of them were exactly what I'd imagined. Really, it needed to be a convertible and have a manual gearbox, and it should feel special. So then I thought, well, I'm a car designer: how difficult can it be?'