When it comes to high performance cars in 2023, there's so much more to them than raw speed. In that respect, the new Aston Martin Valkyrie is about as complicated a car as anyone has attempted. Ever. But, there’s still no getting round how blindingly fast it is. Closer to a spaceship than a motor car, it's intergalactically fast. So fast it fries your brain.
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GQ is at the Bahrain GP circuit in Sakhir, scene of Fernando Alonso’s brilliant podium finish in his debut race for the Aston Martin F1 team, although our visit pre-dates that by a few weeks. The main straight is 0.75km long, and an Aston Martin representative confidently predicts I’ll top 300km/h (186mph) before applying the brakes for the very tight turn one. He’s wrong. I hit 312. That’s 193mph. And because I don’t want to bury a limited series £2.5m hypercar into the wall in a million shards of carbon fibre, I’m on the brakes a earlier than I should be. In other words, 200mph is doable.
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Full disclosure: the prospect of driving the Aston Martin Valkyrie had been making me distinctly nervous. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – one only a fool would turn down. I’ve driven pretty much everything, and managed not to crash that often. But the Valkyrie is an order of magnitude more special than most cars. It isn’t just hugely powerful and monstrously fast, it also has the aerodynamic profile and downforce numbers of a very serious racing car, and past experience has taught me that cars of that ilk need to be driven according to their design. They need proper temperature worked into their tyres and brakes, and if you don’t get them into the window at which the downforce starts to work, you risk falling off the track. Pussy-footing around is simply not an option.
The F1 brains behind the Valkyrie
And that’s not all. GQ was at Aston Martin’s Gaydon HQ in July 2016 when a full-size mock-up of the car was unveiled, where we spoke to one of the prime movers behind it: Red Bull Racing’s Chief Technical Officer, Adrian Newey. At the time, Aston Martin was a sponsor of the serial F1 champions, and was eager to partner with the team in order to create one of the most technically dazzling cars ever conceived. Newey’s F1 machines have won 194 F1 Grands Prix, and 11 constructors’ championships across three different teams. But he’s a restless soul and has always fancied the idea of designing a road car, of channelling his vast intellect and engineering ingenuity into a wholly different sort of challenge.
The Valkyrie is the result, its lengthy gestation disrupted by the sheer scale of everyone’s ambition, the arrival of Aston Martin’s own F1 team in 2021 – farewell Red Bull – and a global pandemic. So the Valkyrie is behind schedule and already has something of a reputation. There were rumours of developmental set-backs, of issues with the car’s noise levels that were so severe that at least one test driver quit because of it, and its dynamic debut at the Goodwood Festival of Speed was… sub-optimal. As with Mercedes-AMG’s equally delayed and similarly ambitious One, it looked as though the Valkyrie might not actually make it. Perhaps these cars were simply a step too far.
Yet here it is. There are two Valkyrie coupes sitting in the desert sunshine currently flooding the Sakhir pit garage, along with a solitary AMR Pro track-only version. Newey’s original concept demanded outrageous aerodynamics and minimal weight, parlaying his notorious (in F1 circles) fixation with extreme packaging into a road car of extraordinary proportions. The Valkyrie is right at the limit of what’s possible in a road-legal car, a borderline miracle of science, craft, and sheer hard graft. This is one of those cars whose form is defined by what’s missing rather than what’s actually visible. It’s all about the spaces in between. Aston Martin’s chief creative officer, Marek Reichman, inherited Newey’s sketches (a lunchtime doodle to begin with) and ordinarily would have fleshed them out, added some volume. Except that the Valkryie is basically an exo-skeleton of a car, four cresting wings over each wheel the only concessions to a design that is almost entirely devoted to aero. The sides are hollowed-out channels of fastidious detail, hustling air around the under-body to suction the car to the ground. A wildly complex front spoiler – more complex, in fact, than the front wing on a 2023 F1 car – and huge rear diffuser locate this thing firmly in the motorsport realm, yet part of the Valkyrie’s remit is that it can be driven on the road. Do that, and you’ll be introducing the everyday world to a car of almost absurd visual drama, a jaw-dropper without parallel. Fortunately, it does have a full body lift to negotiate speed bumps, although I’d give multi-storey car parks a miss. Besides, there’s nowhere to put any shopping.
Inside the cockpit
The real thing is borderline claustrophobic, as forbidding and intoxicating as the cockpit of an LMP1 endurance racing car. A minimalist button releases the ultra-lightweight door, and you slide into a space that looks barely big enough for one person, never mind two. Like pretty much everything else, the seats are made of carbon fibre, so thin they’re almost non-existent (they weigh just 8kg each, a fraction of a conventional car seat’s weight). They’re angled inwards at two degrees, a small but significant increment, and your legs are inclined upwards. It’s rather like lying in a bath, which sounds like an odd position from which to operate a car with this potential but feels natural almost immediately. A little instrument screen sits directly ahead, pulsing with all the usual information but pared down, while two others provide the view behind. There’s a parking brake switch, a hazard warning button and, hilariously, a USB port. It’s impossible to imagine doing anything other than concentrating like your life depended on it while strapped into a Valkyrie. This is not a cup-holder kind of car.
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Given the fashion in top-level motorsport for dramatically reduced, hybridised powertrains, the Valkyrie’s 6.5-litre, Cosworth-developed V12, is gloriously old-school in concept. That said, it’s mated to a 1.68kWH battery pack supplied by Rimac, and how the engineers managed to package a combustion engine that size and an e-motor into this thing is beyond me. The Valkyrie isn’t quite as light as Newey and co were targetting, but with fuel and fluids it weighs about 1,350kg. In a car with a total of 1,139bhp, that means a power-to-weight ratio very close to 1:1. That’s nuts. A few other bits of info: the pump that serves the car’s complex hydraulic system is the same one used by an Apache helicopter, the rear stop light is the smallest size it can possibly be, the windscreen wiper uses a torsion bar and is similar in design to the wipers used on the Space Shuttle, and the Aston Martin badge on the Valkyrie’s nose weighs less than a gram. There’s also a lot of aerospace-grade materials in the Valkryie, and so much titanium that Aston Martin actually pushed up the price of the stuff globally while developing this car. (Apparently the Ministry of Defence got in touch to find out what was going on.)
Ready, set, go
Here we go, then. A start procedure has to be initiated, a little prod on a button spinning the e-motor first before the V12 erupts into life. It takes between two and five seconds to build up the necessary oil pressure. Even with a helmet on and ear buds wedged in, it’s savagely loud inside. The carbon fibre chassis buzzes and thrums with vibrations, not least because the engine is a ‘structural member’, in true race car fashion. Hook first gear by pulling the right-hand paddle; the Valkyrie uses a seven-speed single clutch sequential gearbox supplied by specialist Ricardo. (A dual-shift ’box would be smoother but was deemed much too heavy.) The Valkyrie gets under way in e-mode only, to protect the clutch, before the V12 kicks back in and the world changes shape.
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In order to get a feel for the car, and remember which way the track goes, I follow endurance racing superstar Darren Turner for a few laps. He’s in a track-prepared version of an Aston Martin Vantage, which is very far from being a slouch, especially with him at the wheel. “Trust me, by the end of your second lap, I’ll be absolutely flat-out on the main straight and you’ll be cruising up right behind me.”
I don’t believe him, but he’s right. Amidst the gigantic sensory overload that ensues, there’s an unexpected realisation: the Valkyrie is actually pretty easy to drive. The steering wheel is an odd shape, and could maybe sit a touch higher, but the rest of it fits perfectly. We’re in ‘track’ mode (there’s also ‘urban’ and ‘sport’), so everything is dialled up, but the clever active suspension finds the sweet spot between controlling the body’s movements and allowing some sense of movement. The aero and suspension set-up is designed to work together, hydraulically linked and actuated. It’s furiously clever, and highly effective.
The speed is overwhelming, of course, and you arrive everywhere faster than you think, but there’s no sense that the Valkyrie is hunting the edge of a driver’s ability and primed to make a fool of them. It’s amazingly accessible. It’s fitted with Michelin’s excellent Pilot Sport Cup 2 tyres, which helps, but really it’s all about that amazing engine and the aerodynamics. The V12 revs to an ear-splitting 11,000rpm, an experience like no other, a kind of mechanically-infused banshee wail in second, third and fourth, if you have the space and nerve to extend it. There’s an ERS button for a 140bhp extra slug of electric boost but I’m too busy hanging on to bother with that.
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As for the aero… wow. Flat-out on the main straight with the rear wing flat to reduce aerodynamic drag, the Valkyrie is generating 600kg of downforce. In the corners, that rises to 750kg. Under hard braking, we’re talking 1,100kg of downforce. Specify the ‘Track Pack’ and those numbers are even higher. Aero is all about delivering stability and balance, encouraging the driver to lean on the car in a way that initally feels alien. The faster you go, the better everything gets, the closer to the limit you can go. I know I’m nowhere near it, but the car instils enough confidence to suggest that a day here would have the lap times tumbling. You can throw it into a corner and it just sticks – just don’t think about the money tied up in it. And a word on the Alcon-supplied brakes: the discs are made of carbon ceramic, a whopping 420mm in diameter up-front, 385mm at the rear. They’re astonishing, perfectly modulated and confidence-inspiring, erasing huge speed seemingly in a heartbeat.
Aston Martin will make a total of 150 Valkyries, all of which have been sold. A further 85 Spider versions are coming too, as well as 40 AMR Pro track-only versions. There are those who maintain that this car is a huge folly, that in striving to make it road legal it’s automatically less effective on a circuit. Maybe you’d be better off in a dedicated track car, an old race car or similar, and a separate high-end road car. But that’s too easy. Getting to this point has been anything but for Aston Martin, and the car I drove was one of two that were hammered around Sakhir for five days without missing a beat. The Valkyrie looks astonishing in the flesh, and has a bandwidth beyond almost anything ever attempted. Be glad they did it, I say.
