Connery disliked being associated with Bond by the mid-1960s, but that didn’t stop him from playing the riole two more times after he quit it in 1967 (in 1971 and 1983). And he apparently really liked the Aston Martin, finally buying one two years before he died and painting it to match the one in Goldfinger.
They thought it’d bring up to $1.8M on auction, but it pulled in more than that.
I thought it was weird that Connery only owned the Aston-Martin for two years, but then it occurred to me that he might have purchased it precisely so that it could be auctioned off to benefit his charities. Buying the car and painting it to resemble the one in Goldfinger so that it could be a “Real James Bond Car, owned by James Bond himself” might have been a ploy to increase its value to the point where people would be willing to bid $1M plus for it. That it pulled in $2.4M proves how well that worked.