I wonder if anyone else is feeling a sense of déjà vu as stories circulate that Aston Martin, or at least half of it, is up for sale once more.

Knowing Motor Sport readers as I do, I’m sure one of you could tell me how many owners the company has had in what will shortly be its 100 year history – I’d wager it’s averaging one a decade at least.

For those who missed the story in the Financial Times, their information is that two bidders are currently negotiating to buy half the company from its current owner, Kuwait’s Investment Dar. One, Mahindra & Mahindra, is the world’s largest tractor manufacturer, the other a European investment group called Invest Industrial.

Mahindra’s motives are not clear though it may be as simple as wanting the company as a calling card, a high profile means of gaining the attention of those who’d not normally take too much notice of an Indian tractor maker. It may also make up for the fact that not only did its bid for Jaguar Land Rover fail, it was won by its rival Tata Motors.

The FT reports that Mahindra has made the bigger bid, said to be around £250 million, but that Invest Industrial comes with the promise of a technical partnership with Mercedes-Benz. It seems to me and based on what appears currently to be known, it is this rather than any presumably small difference in bid price that is the critical factor. A little extra money now will do nothing to ensure the long term survival of one of our most coveted and beloved car marques.

What Aston needs, and has needed ever since it was sold by Ford in 2007, is not just money but access to technology, production facilities, components and above all the clout with suppliers that comes with having a vast multi-national car company in your camp. A Bentley engineer once told me that when the company was owned by Vickers he’d approached a colossal German OEM for some fairly vital components and been laughed out of the room. A year later and with Volkswagen now at the helm, he was welcomed like a long lost brother. It is why almost all small, premium car companies are part of vast organisations: you just cannot argue against the bargaining power of scale.

An Aston Martin tie-up with Mercedes would be a good fit however it was structured. Unlike Volkswagen which owns Lamborghini, Bentley and Bugatti and BMW which has Rolls-Royce and Mini, Mercedes has no halo brands in its portfolio now its Maybach experiment has come to an unsuccessful end. There’s precedent too: Mercedes and Aston Martin were known to be talking back in 2009 to the extent that the latter’s awful SUV concept shown that year was based on Mercedes GL-class architecture.

For now though and officially at least, Aston Martin is not for sale in whole or in part, a situation I expect to continue until the moment part of it is indeed sold.

And I hope it is, so long as its new backer brings resources that are more than merely financial to the table. It’s been almost 10 years since the launch of the DB9, a state of the art car paid for by Ford dollars and full of Ford technology and parts. If Aston Martin is not to slip back into its old and unprofitable ways of having to rely upon the looks and sounds of its cars rather than their true competitiveness, it needs that partner, and it needs it now.