When Geoffrey Horton sent me photo’s of today’s featured 1951 Aston Martin DB2 Coupé my first thought was cool another Ferrari with an unusual body, however when I looked up the auction lot number at Bonham’s The Quail event I was surprised to find that the car is in fact a British product with some significant Scandinavian alterations.

The Aston Martin DB2 designed by Claude Hill traces it’s ancestory back to the Aston Martin Atom I looked at last week and through the post war 2 litre sports retrospectively known as the DB1, however the DB2 has a shorter chassis and benefits from a 125hp 2.6 litre / 158 cui 6 cylinder motor designed by none other than W.O.Bentley while he was working for Lagonda, a company purchased by Aston Martin’s owner David Brown in 1947 expressly for the rights to the six cylinder motor.

#LML/50/44 was originally sold to Swedish customer Sölve Relve in 1951 with the steering wheel on the right, Sweden at the time like Britain drove on the correct left hand side of the road.
Later the car belonged to Swedish racing driver Sture Nottorp who amongst his achievements counted driving a 2 stroke SAAB 93 to a 12th place finish at Le Mans in 1959 with countryman Gunnar Bengtsson. I have yet to see any evidence that Sture raced this DB2, if you have any such evidence please do not hesitate to chime in the new facebook friendly comments section below.

In 1960 Yngve Eriksson bought the car and had the body work face lifted with a larger grill, fared headlights larger rear window and had the steering moved from the right to the left which is why the car now has a Ferrari like appearance.

My thanks to Geoffrey Horton for sharing today’s photographs.

Thanks for joining me on this “Seductive Swede” edition of “Gettin’ a li’l psycho on tyres”, I hope you will join me again tomorrow when I’ll be looking at a very original standard Aston Martin DB2. Don’t forget to come back now !