The Aston Martin Vantage is a car that I have been fascinated with ever since the VH II based V8 Vantage first came out in 2005. Luckily my Lotus dealer at the time was also an Aston dealer and gave me a chance to take their demo V8 Vantage for a quick spin up CA-17 and back. However I felt that while it was an achingly beautiful car in person, the performance of the original 4.3L cars did leave something to be desired. Aston seemed to understand this too and a few years later went to the 4.7L engine which improved performance but it still wasn’t a true supercar yet.
That performance gap was filled when they launched the V12 Vantage in 2009. The extra cooling vents meant that the V12 weren’t as pretty as the V8s, but you couldn’t argue with 500 hp and an old school manual transmission. The manual V12s were a 2 year only option in the US and immediately reached collector status. A few years ago a colleague let me drive his manual DBS with the same drive train as the V12 Vantage and the performance immediately cemented the manual V12 Vantage as a bucket list car for me. This interest only grew when the V12 Vantage S was offered with a 7 speed manual for 2017 with only 100 cars being sent to the US. This made the V12VSM the last V12 manual car offered for sale and it received universal acclaim from the worlds motoring press.
Fast forward a few years and several bids on V12 auctions I finally because the proud owner of a 2017 V12 Vantage S Manual in Yellow Tang with the dealer installed AMR power pack that pushes the output up to 590 bhp. During the process of looking for a V12 Vantage I heard from several owners on Bring-a-Trailer and the idea of creating registry for V12 Vantage S Manuals was born.
I volunteered to become the tech lead of the registry and am happy to announce that the Aston Martin V12 Vantage S Manual registry is now live at http://v12vsm.com We are initially focusing on the US spec cars and have been able to collect information on 99 of the 100 cars. Head over to the registry to sort the data in a variety of ways and to see specs, window stickers, photos, sale info and current locations/mods where applicable. If you are a current V12VSM owner please do get in touch with us to add or update information about your car. We are in the process of expanding the site to include non-US cars and hope to eventually include all 351 V12VSMs that were produced.
