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.