2017 Aston Martin DB11

The V-12 is a very old, very antiquated answer to a very old, enduring question: How do you make a lot of power smoothly with a reciprocating engine? Nowadays, with balance shafts and miniature-marvel computers, a turbo four-cylinder does a pretty good job, and more than one company makes a buttery V-8 that wouldn’t tip over a standing nickel. Add direct injection and turbos and you have V-12 power without the size, weight, and moving parts. But there’s just something about sitting behind—or in front of—two inline-sixes married at the crankshaft. The V-12 is the triple-axis tourbillon of an increasingly quartz engine world, and it delights us precisely because of its excessive parts count. Oddly, Aston Martin considers itself a V-12 company, even though its most glorious David Brown era depended on inline-sixes. Carroll Shelby and Roy Salvadori won Le Mans behind one in 1959, and the straight-six served Aston well into the 1970s, when its attention turned to bulldog V-8s. The company didn’t get its first V-12 until 2001, a 5935-cc unit made by splicing together two Ford Duratec V-6s in a CAD program. Ferrari is a V-12 company; Lam­bor­ghini is a V-12 company; Jaguar is a V-12 company, though it hasn’t sold one in years. Aston Martin? Well.