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2017 Aston Martin V12 Vantage S coming to US with manual

A few years back, the lovely Aston Martin V12 Vantage was available with an honest-to-goodness six-speed manual transmission. It was capable of instilling serious cognitive dissonance. "If I sell the cars, the furniture, and remortgage the house twice ..." That sort of thing. The package is back, in a sense. For the 2017 model year, Aston will produce the V12 Vantage S with a seven-speed manual transmission. And not the automated manual business supplied by Graziano, that has attracted my ire for being about as subtle as a kick in the pants. There's a human-operated clutch and a proper manual lever. It gets better, at least if you're a manual-transmission geek. Aston fitted a dogleg box to this car, meaning first gear is to the left and down, below reverse and where second gear would sit in a traditional H-pattern floor shifter. Less traditional is the throttle-blipping function, which will make downshifts smoother for those unable or unwilling to heel-toe. If AMSHIFT, which is Graydon's code-word for the system, is not your thing it can be disabled or used in any driving mode. More good news: there's no real penalty for choosing the manual over the Sportshift III transmission. The two cars are mechanically the same, offer the same performance metrics and top speed, and are offered at the same basic price. New for 2017 but not exclusive to the manual are many exterior and interior cosmetic options, like brightly-colored exterior accents, in line with Aston's recent styling trends. As the subtitle suggests, there is a serious catch for Americans. It's not that we won't get the V12-manual combination – we will! – it's just that there won't be very many of them. It'll be a no-cost option in the rest of the world. If you want one, let's hope you've stopped reading this article the first few lines and hopped on the phone with your local Aston dealer to get a place on what looks like a very short list. Related Video:

Jaguar F-Type squares off against Porsche 911, Aston V8 Vantage with Chris Harris

Chris Harris is back on the job, taking on really really difficult car questions like: Which enormously sexy and good-to-drive, high-performance convertible is the top of the heap? As one of the hottest cars in the luxury space right now, the Jaguar F-Type S is, of course, in on the action. Competition comes in the form of the Aston Martin V8 Vantage Roadster and the Porsche 911 Carrera S Cabriolet. Sun-loving CEOs who despise test-driving need look no further.
Scroll on below for a fully featured (with a running time of more than 20 minutes) comparison video. Harris does his best to entertain - in a typically nitpicky and made-up-British-words fashion - and the moving pictures are lovely to look at. Kick back, pour a pint and get your weekend started off right.

Autoblog's adventures at the Nurburgring 24-Hour race [spoilers]

The brand-new Audi R8 LMS, said to share 50 percent of its components with the street-legal R8 shown off at Geneva, has won its very first race at the 2015 Nurburgring 24-Hours. The No. 28 car driven by Christopher Mies, Edward Sandstrom, Nico Muller, and Laurens Vanthoor for the Audi Sport WRT team out of Belgium finished only 40.279 seconds ahead of the No. 25 BMW Sport Team Marc VDS Z4 GT3 in second place, for the smallest winning gap since the race began in 1970. Those two cars traded the lead throughout Sunday morning and were less than a minute away from one another for the last two hours. They were part of a total 35 lead changes during the entire race – a record for the event – and both did 156 laps. Third place went to the No. 44 Falken Tire Porsche 997 GT3, one lap down. The Audis did what they always do: lurked close to the front, stayed out of trouble, then pounced when everyone else faltered. For the opening stretches the BMW Z4 teams owned it, running 1-2-3 for a while, but all of them hit trouble. When morning came and the race got over its yellow-flag fever, the No. 28 Audi was in front and stayed there. It was the third Nurburgring 24-Hour win for Audi in four years, the brand's first win only coming in 2012. Last year's winner, the Phoenix Audi team that set a race record by doing 159 laps, had both of its cars retire. One hit an oil patch about 12 hours in, spun and was hit by another car behind, taking on too much damage to continue. The other retired with engine issues. Other Notes Three cars crashed out of the race while leading, after the rains that weren't supposed to happen, happened about 90 minutes in. The No. 20 Schubert BMW Z4 led the first 50 minutes of the race, hopped a crest at Pflanzgarten, landed in a pool of water, and hit the wall on the 30th lap. Then the No. 30 Frikadelli Porsche, with a driver team that included ex-'Ring Taxi driver Sabine Schmitz, hit the No. 31 Mercedes SLS AMG GT3 on the approach to Carrousel and crashed out. Then the No. 1 Phoenix Audi, last year's winning car, took the lead but hit the wall after that oil patch near Pflanzgarten and was out of the race. Aston Martin celebrated a class win in the SP8 category with the No. 49 Vantage GT4 N430. This being the tenth anniversary of the Vantage running the Nurburgring-24, this year's car was painted in the same colors as the racecar from ten years ago.