Can you stop doing this, please?” requested colleague and friend Richard Bremner. He’s got a point. This is the second feature in a year that has involved Bremner and I getting together with some of the younger members of the Autocar team and some iconic cars of varying vintage. It’s fun but it does make us feel rather ancient.  So here we are again. The challenge this time is for half a dozen of us, representing a broad sweep of ages on the magazine, to choose our favourite from cars that were launched in the year we were born. You can now appreciate Bremner’s anxiety, not least because he’s the oldest.  As you will read, the exercise has brought together a truly fascinating line-up of cars; a group so varied that they would be unlikely to appear together in a feature in a classic car magazine.  They’re from a wide range of years, too. Bremner starts us off in 1958, followed soon after by me in 1962 and stretching right up to Simon Davis, who the stork deposited on the earth in 1993. In between, we have Matt Prior in 1975, Matt Saunders in 1981 and Mark Tisshaw in 1989.  The cars are interesting in their own right, but they also mark moments in time and put into context the companies and industry that produced them.  My choice, as you’ll see, and Tisshaw’s, are extremely closely linked despite being 27 years apart in age. Prior’s and Saunders’ cars also narrate a telling tale about the British motor industry, straddling the old world and foreshadowing the new one.  Who out of the six was born in the best year for cars? We’ll be tackling that thorny one, but I’ll tell you right now: from memory and from checking on Wikipedia, I can’t see how Saunders will be able to put forward a case for 1981.  So follow us on this journey back to the crib. I’ll wager that all of you will be poring over the list of cars launched in the year of your birth to see if you’re from a vintage year or one in which the grapes died on the vine. Richard Bremner – 1964 Aston Martin DB4 Quite surprisingly, the DB4 is the best-known new car that 1958 produced. Well, almost – it’s the succeeding but largely identical DB5 that’s familiar throughout much of the world as the Aston Martin of James Bond. But there would have been no inkling of this at the time. Only 1110 DB4s were produced, the car’s price ensuring it a rarefied clientele and infrequent sightings for the rest of us.  Miles certainly aren’t drawn out in a DB4. This coupé had 240bhp to deploy 61 years ago – massive, compared with the 37bhp of a Morris Minor 1000. Not that sterile statistics make it my choice among the class of ’58. Rather obviously, it’s the exquisite beauty of its superleggera aluminium skin that makes this the irresistible fantasy choice.  Designed by coachbuilders Touring of Milan, its complex construction consisted of a steel chassis, a tubular steel framework from which were hung hand-wrought aluminium panels that with rain and time provide an expensive demonstration of electrolytic corrosion. But the alloy panels also reduced the Aston’s weight, its 1311kg not so bad given the size and the heft of the twin-cam six-cylinder lying beneath its letterbox-scooped bonnet.  In the unlikely event that you tire of admiring the DB4’s just-so lines, opening the bonnet also presents you with a beautifully sculpted cluster of machinery. The low walls of the cam covers that house neatly arrayed spark plug leads, the bell-shaped domes of the twin SU carburettors and the absence of plastic mouldings make this a sight to admire even if you don’t understand the combustive forces that occur within. When it was new, those forces were sufficient to thrust the elegant nose past 60mph in 9.0sec. Slightly disappointing today, perhaps, if scaldingly fast compared with a Minor 1000.  Many of these earliest of DB4s – the Series 1 you see here the first of five mild evolutions – have had their cylinder blocks bored out of necessity, the pistons and liners required to renew them unavailable for decades. The only solution was to expand the engine to 4.2 litres, yielding 280 horsepower, and of more believable strength than the original 240bhp. More realistic, says this car’s owner Bryan Smart, is 215bhp. Despite his installing a longer-legged axle ratio to counter the lack of overdrive, this DB4 bounds away, and will quite effortlessly travel at 30mph in first should you need it. That makes it more than able to keep up with, and outpace, many moderns, providing you master a gearchange that requires a sometimes brutally firm hand to gift first gear. The rest submit more easily, and with rewardingly mechanical engagement once their oils are warmed.  The chassis sometimes feels quite mechanical too, from the resistant heavy steering to a suspension prone to sudden, vintage jerks and geometry that allows topography-induced wander. So you need to pay attention. Paying attention to curves and throttle brings reward too, the Aston’s urge to run wide snuffed out
Origin: The test of time: the best cars from the Autocar team’s birth-years