An Aston Martin DB5 bought for less than £1,000 from an advert in Motor Sport magazine in the early 1970s has completed a full, three-year restoration at Aston Martin Works – a resurrection that has transformed a rusted, once-forgotten relic into a car now valued at up to £1 million.

The story started with John Williams, a Welsh welder and garage owner who was just 18 when he set himself the target of buying his dream car: a DB5.

In 1972 he began saving, taking on overtime and putting aside every spare pound. By the autumn of 1973, aged 19, he had scraped together £900 – roughly £15,000 in today’s money – and boarded a train from North Wales to London to view a 1965 DB5 advertised in the pages of Motor Sport.

It was a desirable model: a right-hand-drive Vantage-engined car with Weber carburettors, wire wheels, Sundym electric windows and what the ad called “many bills”.

For Williams, that was enough. He bought it on the spot and drove it proudly back to Wales, where the DB5 served as his daily driver for four years.

In 1977, Williams left to take a job in the Middle East. The Aston was parked on the driveway, and then, as he puts it, “life happened”.

The car started to deteriorate, and while offers came and crises tempted Williams to sell, he hung onto it.

“I’d had offers to buy her, and times when I could have done with the money, but I resisted and, as Sue [his wife] said, ‘you’ll never get another one’,” he said.

In the meantime, mice took up residence and neighbourhood children treated the dormant DB5 as playground equipment.

“They’d play on her,” said Sue Williams. “Bouncing on the bonnet. One balanced on the exhaust pipe and snapped it off!”

For a garage man, the slow decline of his dream car was a source of shame, but also motivation.

“As time went on it became a goal of mine to get her restored; to be able to drive her again” Williams said. “I worked hard to buy her, and we’ve worked hard to get her repaired.”

When the moment finally came, the couple chose Aston Martin Works in Newport Pagnell, the home of more than 13,000 hand-built Astons and the heart of the company’s heritage operations.

The restoration began in late 2022. Over the next three years, the Williamses made regular trips to Buckinghamshire to watch the process unfold: the bare-metal reconstruction in the panel shop, the hand-formed aluminium body panels and the painstaking rebuild of its Superleggera frame.

The car’s original specification only underscores its rarity. Of the 1022 DB5s built between 1963 and 1965, just 887 were saloons. Of those, only 39 left the factory in Silver Birch with a Vantage engine and right-hand drive, the exact configuration most associated with James Bond and the enduring DB5 mythology.

The Williams example was first delivered to the exclusive St George’s Hill enclave in Surrey, then home to figures such as John Lennon and Ringo Starr.

Seeing the restoration mid-way through in 2023, Williams was moved: “It looks like an Aston Martin now. I’m thrilled. It’s great to see the old ways of building a car have been passed on, and younger people here are keeping up the tradition.”

In total, more than 2,500 hours of labour went into resurrecting the DB5.

Paul Spires, president of Aston Martin Works, called it “a lovely story” and said the car had arrived in “a profoundly run-down condition”.

Bringing it back to life, he said, was both a challenge and a privilege. Given its specification, Spires said, “a value of up to £1m would be in order” if the car were ever to return to the market.

For Williams, the true worth is emotional. Seeing the finished car for the first time brought almost 50 years of waiting to an end.

“It’s been a long time coming, a long time saving, but it’s been worth every penny,” he said. “It’s probably almost 50 years since I’ve driven this car, but the experience is phenomenal. My girl’s back and up and running – back to her former glory.”