When we imagine ourselves on a race track driving one of the fastest and most powerful cars on the planet how do we normally envision that drive? Do we see it as an opportunity to allow the car to do all the work while we just sit back and steer? That’s not even close to the way most of us envision our drive on the racetrack. On the track we want to shift our own gears and feel as if we are taking the place of our favorite race driver and some of these visions and dreams carry over to the regular streets as well.
When it comes to the ultimate in driving you want to have a manual transmission, but many automakers are shying away from these, especially when it comes to their higher powered vehicles that seem to be made too powerful for manual shifting. In reality an automatic is the best way to go with the advancements in technology today that put these automatics at the forefront of automotive upgrades. We want to enjoy the right power paired with the right transmission and most of us feel that would be a manual when it comes to a performance car, but time and again the automakers of today are proving us wrong.
One automaker that sides with us as the general public is Aston Martin. They are going to have a seven-speed manual transmission in the V12 Vantage S for us to be able to row through our own gears. While this is a car that is highly exclusive with only 100 made the chance to shift your own gears in a car that offers massive horsepower is tempting for most of the world. the price will keep the masses away, but for those lucky 100 drivers my hope is they take this beauty out to the track and tear up some tires while letting this beast loose.
How loose can it be? the V12 Vantage S shows up with a 5.9-liter V12 engine under the hood that gives us 565 horsepower and 457 lb.-ft. of torque. This powertrain will allow you to reach sixty mph in less than 3.9 seconds, but that is going to be up to your expertise at rowing the gears on your own. There will only be a handful of these cars offered in the US which will make them difficult to find, but you just might see one in your neighborhood sometime toward the end of the year.
As you can see Aston Martin is one company that will continue to embrace the manual gearbox in one of their best models. With such a low delivery number we can’t fairly compare the V12 Vantage S with a car that sells over 10,000 units or more per year, but it certainly is good to see at least one car company that isn’t afraid to embrace one of the dying parts of car technology for us to admire and fully enjoy.
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