12 cylinders, 11,000rpm: Aston Martin’s new engine is a monster

Aston Martin

The world of ultra-high-performance cars is an odd one. Stratospheric prices and tiny production runs mean few people will ever see one on the move; fewer still will experience one from the driver's seat. The relentless march of progress pushes their specs further and further to the edge; 400hp might have seemed more than you'd ever need in the 1970s but would now be barely adequate in a sporting sedan. And these cars often act as harbingers for impending global catastrophe-just look at the timing of the Ferrari Daytona or McLaren F1.

In the current era, we had to find a new term to even describe these four-wheeled exotics. Calling them supercars no longer sufficed, so now we have the hypercar. A few years ago, McLaren, Ferrari, and Porsche kicked things off with a trio of hybrids, each costing more than a million dollars and each nearing 1,000hp.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments