The recent news that Aston Martin hopes to enter Formula 1 in the near future, suggests that we will soon have a third chapter in the F1 history on the firm that was set up in 1913 by Singer Motors salesmen Robert Bamford and Lionel Martin. Their first car, which appeared two years later, was based on an Isotta-Fraschini, powered by a Coventry Simplex engine. They called this an Aston Martin, the Aston name coming from the famous hillclimb in the Chilterns, near the village of Aston Clinton. It was a struggle to survive, but after the war they were fortunate to find a patron in 27-year-old Count Louis Zborowski.

If you drive up to London from Dover on the old A2 road, shortly before you reach Canterbury, if you are paying attention, you may catch a glimpse of a grand mansion on the right hand side, close to the village of Bridge. This is Higham Park. It was bought in 1910 by Countess Margaret Zborowski, known as Maggie to her friends. She was the widow of Count Elliot Zborowski, who could trace his American forebears back to 1662. His name was Polish (probably) and with Poland famed for its extensive aristocracy, no-one seemed to question whether the Count had any right to the title he used. What he did have was a lot of money.

His family were successful entrepreneurs and landowners and once the family fortune was established, the later generations were able to take up gentlemanly pastimes, such as polo and fox-hunting. It was in pursuit of the fox that Elliot Zborowski settled in Melton Mowbray in England, a town famed for its pork pies and its fox hunting. He rode with great gusto in many famous hunts and, being a glamorous sort of chap, soon encountered Margaret, the Baroness de Steurs. Despite the Dutch title, she was one of the Astor Family, and owned a large chunk of Manhattan, which meant that money was never really a problem. She had a considerable fortune and soon a messy divorce as well. She and Elliot married and in 1895 their son Louis – known as Lou – was born.

Eight years later, while driving a Mercedes on the La Turbie hillclimb, Elliot crashed into a rock face and was killed.

A year after buying Higham Park, Maggie died young from heart trouble, leaving Lou as the heir to a vast fortune. He was 16 but would have to wait five years to get his hands on the money… He was briefly at Eton but was mainly tutored at home, where without parental guidance he became something of a wild teenager, one of his tricks being to ride a motorcycle on the scaffolding that surrounded Higham at the time. He was not involved in World War I because of kidney problems and in 1916 he finally got his hands on the money. It was not long before he married a showgirl, Vi Leicester, and she became the next Countess. He engaged an engineer called Captain Clive Gallop, a former Royal Flying Corps pilot, and together in the stables at Higham, they began building racing cars. He also built a mile-long narrow gauge railway on the estate, just for fun, and managed to get into trouble, being named in a divorce case as the lover of a lady called Pixi Marix.

The first car they built was a modified Mercedes, fitted with a vast 23-litre Maybach engine which had been used to power Zeppelins during the war. This monster dominated at Brooklands. It was called Chitty Bang Bang. It was followed by another revamped Mercedes fitted with an 18-litre Benz aero-engine. This was not as successful as Chitty I but proved to be very reliable and was even taken on a tour of the Sahara Desert at the start of 1922. That year Lou invested in Aston Martin and he and Gallop took part in the Grand Prix de l’ACF in Strasbourg racing Grand Prix Aston Martins, Gallop having nudged him towards cars built by others after Chitty I had a tyre failure and crashed through one of the Brooklands timing boxes. A third Chitty was built later but Zborowski was by then using customer cars and in 1923 he travelled to Indianapolis and raced a streamlined Bugatti in the 500. While in America he bought a Miller and brought it back to Europe and at the end of the year fought a stirring battle with Alberto Divo for victory in the Spanish GP at Sitges-Terramar. Divo won.

Back at Higham, he and Gallop built a speed record car, called the Higham Special but in the autumn of 1924 Zborowski accepted an invitation to race for the Mercedes factory team at Monza. Something went wrong in the Lesmos and he went off into the trees. The Count was dead at 29. Aston Martin soon went out of business. Higham was sold. The Higham Special was acquired by Parry Thomas and renamed Babs and he died at the wheel of this huge car on the Pendine Sands in 1927, while trying to set a speed record.

But that is not really the end of the story. In the 1960s an author who had been at Eton just after World War I and had followed the exploits of old Etonian Zborowski, decided he would write a children’s book, based on the stories. He added a second Chitty to the name of the car and his Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang was a huge success and soon became a celebrated children’s movie. His name was Ian Fleming, and if that sounds familiar it is because he had already made his fortune in a very different genre of writing, with a string of novels in the 1950s about a secret agent called James Bond, who always drove Aston Martins. The Bond franchise is one of the biggest in the history of publishing and film and is such a powerful brand that the character is used today by Aston Martin to promote its cars.