The Aston Martin Valkyrie Hypercar entered the world with a licence plate attached, yet it was designed from the get-go to be a world-beating endurance racer. Every element, from the ingenious aerodynamics to the bestial power and the engineering team’s most obsessive precision, was exacted in order to achieve speed and dominance. Now it’s being put to the test in the most hotly-contested of crucibles: the FIA World Endurance Championship, the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and, most evocatively, the legendary 24 Hours of Le Mans.
It is with this car that Aston Martin intends to take overall victory at La Sarthe for the first time since 1959, and it’ll have the fans reaching for their ear defenders. Of the eight marques competing in the Hypercar category, only Aston Martin’s machine is derived from a road-going model, which demonstrates the purity of the company’s racing DNA and builds on the production car’s F1-derived technology and road-going refinement. Unlike the majority of Le Mans Hypercars which compete with V6 and V8 hybrid power units, the Aston Martin Valkyrie Hypercar stays true to its roots, delivering a leonine V12 roar that’ll keep the 300,000 spectators up all night.
Aston Martin’s Chief Creative Officer Marek Reichman reveals the philosophy that was imbued in the hypercar from its genesis. “The story began nine years ago and the concept was to take a revolutionary aerodynamic approach; a technical tour-de-force with incredible exoskeletal design and packaging. It’s a kind of ‘air-through’ look. Unlike our other production cars, there’s nothing solid about an Aston Martin Valkyrie. It’s like the skin’s been taken off to reveal the muscles. It celebrates negative space, and you can see every sinew of its muscularity.”
The race-optimised carbon-fibre chassis is powered by a lean-burn version of the customer car’s Cosworth-built naturally-aspirated V12, meeting the performance parameters of the Hypercar class and hewn to withstand the rigours of extreme 24-hour competition. That means that while it’s the most efficient Valkyrie, it’s also the least powerful Valkyrie; the 1,140bhp 11,000rpm 6.5-litre engine has been detuned to a comparatively stately 680bhp in order to conform to the regulations. Like the AMR Pro, the most track-focused customer version of the Aston Martin Valkyrie, the race car does without the road car’s hybrid system. A new Xtrac transmission has been installed, along with a single-point rapid refuelling coupling, high-speed pneumatic jack system and a cockpit fine-tuned for swift ingress and egress. As per the rulebook, it rolls on mandated Michelin Pilot Sport 18” rubber.
And, naturally, the bodywork has evolved in-line with the pursuit of lap-time as well as jaw-dropping aesthetics. Over to Marek, who has overseen the Aston Martin Valkyrie’s design changes: “When you see the road car and the race car together, they are similar, but no single surface is the same. The Aston Martin Valkyrie Hypercar has a longer wheelbase and different overhangs front and rear. It’s got different front and rear wing systems and a different splitter. It’s more upright at the front and cuts through the air in a very, very different way.
Every single element is designed around the airflow systems that push the car to the ground around high-speed corners but prevent too much drag on the long straights.
“But importantly we’ve managed to maintain its visual language and that air-through look, so the customer can see their own car’s direct genetics in this race car.
“Beauty is also a consideration. How can you do that, you may ask, because surely performance is paramount? I’ll give you two examples of beautiful form meets high-performance function: One is the Spitfire, the other is Concorde. No one went into those projects looking to design the world’s most beautiful aircraft, but they found aerodynamic benefits in the most beautiful curves. That’s exactly what we’ve done with the Aston Martin Valkyrie Hypercar; working with aerodynamicists not to just stop at the first solution but to go further and find solutions that maximise performance while contributing to the beautiful design language.”
The advantage of having a race car derived from a road car is that its relatively comfortable and refined, which the drivers are sure to appreciate over some 2,600 racing miles at Le Mans, and it has excellent visibility.
“You won’t drive over a stone and feel it in your spine – it’s quite a compliant car,” explains Reichman. “It’s not like sitting in an armchair, but it feels natural. The drivers aren’t fighting in the seat, fighting for viewing angles. They can push to the maximum for three hours and then jump out like a spring chicken to let their teammate take the reins. These systems we deploy materially enable the car to both compete at Le Mans and drive down the track to your farmhouse.”
The hypercar’s handsome racing livery is, in part, an ode to the DBR1 that was driven to victory by Roy Salvadori and Carroll Shelby. Its Almond Green can be seen in the hypercar’s chequer pattern, along with lighter shades of green that storyboard Aston Martin’s glorious past and present.
Famously, Adrian Newey was central to the technical design of the Aston Martin Valkyrie concept when he was at Red Bull Racing, and now, nine years later, he’s the Managing Technical Partner at the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team. The Aston Martin Valkyrie has come on a journey, too. “The original concept was that this would be a Le Mans hypercar for the road,” confirms Reichman, “and now it’s come 360. This was always in the back of our minds; to build a Le Mans car for the road and then race it at Le Mans.”
Watch the Aston Martin Valkyrie Hypercar in action below.
