The new V12 Vantage is nearly upon us. It has some enormous shoes to fill...
Back when Top Gear was still capable of producing some genuinely sublime moments amongst the ridiculous, you may remember Clarkson's brilliantly evocativeof the then-new Aston Martin V12 Vantage. I think it's fair to say that only people who truly understood cars could have made a piece of prime-time TV like that. Why? Because they were confident enough to let the car do the talking.
That wasn't the only celebrity endorsement that turned his head."I also read a piece by Chris Evans who went to a party with two V12 manuals parked outside; one driven by Christian Horner and the other by Adrian Newey. Evans wrote 'I want to be in that club.' Well, so did I, because if it was good enough for the boss of the Red Bull F1 team and the best designer in F1 history, it was good enough for me.
Because the Vantage used the VH Generation II architecture, it gave the team the flexibility to fit the larger engine. It just needed the front crash structure adapting to accommodate the longer V12 alongside a new cooling pack, and with revised radiators and those multiple bonnet vents to improve airflow around the engine bay. A new sump was also developed that allowed the unit to sit low enough to accommodate the original bonnet and front wings. A single V12 mule was made.
The V12 S arrived in 2013. This added a new Bosch engine management system and lessons learned from the Vantage GT racers, including CNC machined combustion chambers and hollow camshafts. In the UK it was available solely with the Sportshift III transmission, which saved 25kg over the six-speed manual. And it raised the power to 573hp and 457lb ft, lowering the 0-62mph sprint to 3.9 seconds and pushing its ultimate speed to 205mph.
Beyond that fleeting column shake the structure of both cars feels impressively stiff, and once I was swooping though the flowing Warwickshire countryside the ride quality morphs into the sublime. Taut, yes, even in the V12, which is certainly the grand tourer of the party, but you only feel that in hefty compressions. Otherwise, the V12, which tips the scales at 1,680kg, trips across the topography with such a lambent style that you'd swear there was half the mass involved.
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