F1 engineer begins restoring Aston Martin left abandoned for 45 YEARS

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Classic Cars

F1 engineer begins restoring Aston Martin left abandoned for 45 YEARS

It's quite an undertaking...

Chris Deeley

Sunday 15 February 2026 22:55

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It's important for young engineers and mechanics to have a passion project in their spare time – and buying a run-down old car to get it running again can be a great way to do that.

We wouldn't necessarily recommend that a 23-year-old get their dad to drop nearly £150k on the shell of a 1960 Aston Martin DB4 that's been in a collapsed garage for the better part of half a century, but that's exactly what Edward Crossley's father Julian has done.

To be fair, it's not even close to the most we've seen a father shell out to get his son in an Aston Martin that barely looks like it can move. ~~Lance and Lawrence Stroll. We mean Lance and Lawrence Stroll. Obviously.~~

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The youngster works for Williams and has also, with his father's sponsorship, set up Crossley Motorsport, a group of young engineers – some of them still students.

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Restoring Aston a 'once in a lifetime opportunity'

Crossley and co will be posting updates from their restoration – which they expect to take somewhere in the region of two years – on their YouTube channel, where they uploaded 'part 1' earlier this month.

The young engineer told the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald: “Having the chance to restore a car like this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“We’ll use specialists where and where necessary but our aim is to show that it can be done for less money and we’re aiming to build this car in about two years, which is very ambitious given we’re only a weekend project.

“We’ve had our fair share of people saying we won’t be able to do it, it can't be undertaken as a father-son project or by a bunch of uni lads messing around at the weekends, but our aim is to prove those people wrong and hopefully inspire younger people to think, ‘You know what, I’ll pick up a spanner’, or, ‘If they can do it, I can do it’.”

F1 Aston Martin