Wilbur Gunn, an American who had come to England as an opera singer, began building motorcycles and then cars at Staines, then in Middlesex, and founded Lagonda there in 1906. He named it after the Shawnee settlement of Lagonda near his home town of Springfield, Ohio.
Lagonda built fast, well-made touring cars between the wars, and in 1935 an M45R Rapide won the Le Mans 24 Hours. The company went into receivership the same year and was bought by Alan Good, who recruited W. O. Bentley as technical director; Bentley’s Lagonda V12, launched in 1937, is often called his masterpiece.
In 1947 industrialist David Brown bought Lagonda and merged it with Aston Martin, and Bentley’s six-cylinder engine went on to power the early Aston Martin DB cars. The Lagonda name was used on the Rapide saloon of 1961 and, most famously, on William Towns’s futuristic wedge-shaped Aston Martin Lagonda of 1976, of which 645 were built until 1990. Aston Martin revived the name briefly for the Taraf saloon in 2015.
