Today’s James Bond with yesterday James Bond Aston Martin
This Friday, October 5th is Global James Bond Day which celebrates 50 years of action and adventure with everyone’s favorite spy. Events are being held across the world to celebrate the occasion with one in particular being high on the list for car fanatics. The Beaulieu attraction in the United Kingdom is hosting the Bond In Motion exhibit with over 50 original vehicles from the franchise on display.
You can get up close and personal with some of the most iconic vehicles from the films. There’s the Aston Martin DB5 that Pierce Brosnan raced against a Ferrari 355 GTS through the mountains near Monte Carlo in GoldenEye. You can also see the Lotus Esprit S1 from The Spy Who Loved Me which morphed into a submarine when Roger Moore drove it right off the end of a pier. Not all the vehicles on display belonged to the good guys, though.
They’ve got the Rolls-Royce Phantom III that was used by Goldfinger to smuggle all his precious gold and the little Bath-O-Sub that failed to save villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld at the end of Diamonds Are Forever. Instead, the ever clever James Bond used it to blow up an oil rig and save the day.
There are also motorboats, hovercrafts, motorcycles, surfboards and even speargun sleds that span the 23 James Bond films that have been released in the last 50 years. Many of these vehicles have never been seen before in public and some haven’t even debuted on the big screen yet.
Three vehicles from the set of the upcoming film, Skyfall are also part of the Bond in Motion exhibit. There are two Honda CRF250R motorbikes, including one ridden by Daniel Craig, and a Land Rover Defender 110 that’s in the movie’s opening scenes. You can see the cars in action when the film hits US theaters on November 9th.
The Bond in Motion exhibit will be at Beaulieu until January 6, 2013, but if you can, make it there this Friday, October 5th for Global James Bond Day, then you may be in for a special treat. The first 50 people who buy a ticket to the Beaulieu attraction will receive a James Bond themed gift.
No word on what the gift actually is, but if it’s anything other than a phone with an app that let’s me drive a car from the back seat like Pierce Brosnan did in the back of a BMW 750iL in Tomorrow Never Dies, then I will be very disappointed.
Nicole Wakelin fell in love with cars as a teenager when she got to go for a ride in a Ferrari. It was red and it was fast and that was all that mattered. Game over. She considers things a bit more carefully now, but still has a weakness for fast, beautiful cars. When not drooling over cars, Nicole writes for Wired’s GeekMom.
