'Where's my Bentley?’ James Bond famously asked Q in 1964’s Goldfinger. ‘Oh, it’s had its day, I’m afraid,’ replied MI6’s quartermaster. ‘You’ll be using this Aston Martin DB5, with modifications.’ The rest, as film fans will know, is history.
Now, some 60 years on, there is a new Aston Martin, again with modifications, which might be almost as exciting and iconic as the original DB5. The big difference, however, is that this one has two wheels rather than four and Bond would probably require bicycle clips to ensure that his suit trousers didn’t catch in the carbon crank and chainset. Produced in partnership with titanium bicycle-maker J.Laverack, this is the .1R — the most bespoke, advanced and meticulously engineered road bicycle ever made.
The brains behind the .1R are J.Laverack co-owners Oli Laverack and Dave Clow. The two bike-obsessed friends launched their brand a decade ago in Rutland with the intention of creating high-end titanium-framed bicycles featuring designs that blend the classic and the modern. Working out of a smart, but small workshop on a scruffy industrial estate in the countryside, they named their company after Mr Laverack’s Yorkshire-born grandfather, himself a keen cyclist.
From the start, the pair’s creations earned rave reviews: impeccably finished, utterly refined and reassuringly expensive, they are for cyclists who are deadly serious about riding. They have a few well-known customers, including former Formula 1 world champion Sebastian Vettel, but it was a man called Garry Barker who changed things for J. Laverack.
A design sculptor at Aston Martin, Mr Barker’s job was to make clay models of new cars — his first was the Vantage — and, after commissioning one of J.Laverack’s first bicycles, he started to use it to commute 40 miles a day from his home to the Aston headquarters at Gaydon in Warwickshire.
‘Rain or shine, Garry would ride his bike to work and park it in the design studio,’ Mr Clow recalls. ‘One day, Marek Reichman, Aston Martin’s executive vice president and chief creative officer, spotted it, liked what he saw, and he ordered a bike. Then, after he ordered a second one and we delivered it to him personally, he said to us: “Hey, we should do bikes together.” It was a throwaway comment, but it got us thinking.’
In a world first, the bike makes use of integrated aluminium brake calipers.
Mr Laverack and Mr Clow were doubtful that anything would come of Mr Reichman’s suggestion. They were five years into their business, the outlook was bright and they were looking forward to a big 2020. And then they weren’t.
‘Covid happened,’ says Mr Laverack. ‘We locked the studio, went home and everything ground to a halt. We sat down with acres of spare time ahead of us and started thinking: if we were going to design a bike for Aston Martin, what would it look like? And then we simply couldn’t stop.’
‘Each bicycle can be made, painted and modified however the rider wants it’
From the start, their primary motivation was that this wouldn’t be a ‘sticker exercise’: they refused to build a bicycle and then merely put the Aston Martin logo on it. Instead, they would focus on cutting-edge design. When Mr Reichman looked at their proposals, he was bowled over by the idea and enlisted an internal team to help J. Laverack bring their vision to life.
The brief was that it should be bespoke, go through the same state-of-the-art design processes as an Aston Martin road vehicle, use the kind of manufacturing techniques that would more commonly be found on a Formula 1 racing car and be completely hand-built. Five extraordinary and painstaking years later, it was finally finished.
‘The J.Laverack Aston Martin .1R is essentially a titanium hypercar on two wheels,’ says Mr Reichman. ‘The simple, clever genius is how we’ve fused the engineering advancements throughout the bike with a purity of performance design to deliver a viscerally exhilarating riding experience.’
The .1R in the workshop today — chassis number 2 of only 100 — is an exquisite piece of design, unlike any other bicycle in the world. With almost no externally visible bolts, cables or hoses, it features aerospace-grade titanium lugs, herringbone-patterned carbon-fibre tubes (the same as the Aston Martin Valkyrie) and graphics that are 40 microns thick (half the thickness of a human hair). ‘Slide your finger across it and you can’t even feel them,’ Mr Laverack says.
Each bicycle officially takes more than 1,000 hours to create, following a staggering amount of research and development. ‘There has never ever been a bike made like this,’ Mr Clow explains.
‘The brake calipers are fully integrated and precision machined from a single piece of aluminium. The handlebars are perfectly made to measure. Each bicycle can be made, painted and modified however the rider wants it. We even have a few patents pending on design elements that are completely new.’
Customers are invited to the Aston Martin headquarters for a bespoke fitting, when they can configure the bike, choose any specifications and select a colour scheme. One patron stated that he wants his .1R to match his Aston Martin & Brough Superior track-only superbike and his Valhalla (Aston Martin’s first hybrid hypercar) and plans to put them on display in his house.
When it is delivered, the bicycle will arrive in a custom-built travel case with a tool kit. Owners can decide if they want to ride it or simply look longingly at it, stroking the hand-stitched Alcantara seat specially commissioned from Brooks.
All in all, it is a thing of wonder. The only question left is: how much does it cost?
Mr Laverack and Mr Clow exchange a look. ‘I think the official answer is “price on application”,’ Mr Laverack says.
“But given what has gone into it, the number of years we’ve devoted to it, the cost of developing it — both on our side and Aston Martin’s — I think it is…’ He trails off.
Cheap? Ludicrously expensive? Fair? If you really want to know, contact the company and join the waiting list. If you do get one, we suggest you follow Q’s advice: ‘Do be careful with it, 007.’
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