Aston Martin made a surprising move Wednesday by announcing a redesigned V12 engine.
On the whole, the industry has been spending the past several years pivoting away from high-displacement V12 engines in favor of smaller, more power-dense units. And if you’re a fan of Astons with a big-old V12 under the hood — and I am definitely in that camp — today’s news is a welcome sigh of relief. Even as the new DB12 dropped its twelve-cylinder offering in favor of a ubiquitous 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8, Aston Martin says this is “the dawn of a new V12 era” as it teases us with numbers on its new flagship powerplant.
To that end, engineers reworked pretty much every major piece of hardware from their existing 5.2-liter AE31 engine in the DBS 770 Ultimate. The redesigned V12 has a strengthened cylinder block and connecting rods, new cylinder heads with reprofiled camshafts, new intake and exhaust ports, repositioned spark plugs and higher flow rate fuel injectors. And, to add that little bit more punch, Aston Martin says there are new higher speed, reduced inertia turbochargers as well.
The result of the overhaul is a mighty 824 horsepower and 738 lb-ft of torque (or 835 PS and 1,000 N-m, if you prefer metric numbers). For reference, the DBS 770 Ultimate manages 759 horsepower and 664 lb-ft, which is already impressive performance in its own right.
With the DBS on its way out, Aston Martin announced this new engine would indeed make its way into a new flagship model, set to debut later this year. Most likely, the company will revive the Vanquish name for this car (after the last AM29 Vanquish S went out of production in 2018), as the statement concludes with this sentense: “All will be vanquished”.
Bring it on!
