Aston Martin Valkyrie

The striking aerodynamic exterior and open underfloor maximise downforce and harness the atmosphere around Aston Martin Valkyrie. All-carbon fibre bodywork carries Aston Martin's trademark upper grille outline before flowing into a radical body shape that is utterly honed for performance.

There is not one single steel component in Aston Martin Valkyrie's structure. It is 100% carbon fibre, minimising load while pushing the power:weight ratio to the max.

Aston Martin Valkyrie comes as close as possible to being a Formula One™ car without being restricted to the track. Its rebellious technology is the direct result of our partnership with Red Bull Racing Advanced Technology with all the Aston Martin hallmarks of cleverly crafted luxury.  

Tolerance of 3.5g. Speeds of 322km/h. Downforce more typically associated with the lift and pitch of a fighter jet. If you’ve heard the rumour that part of an Aston Martin Valkyrie comes from an Apache gunship, the rumour is true. Nothing that already existed in the automotive world had the hydraulic power required to run all this. Or handle the pressure of bringing F1® track pedigree to the road. The downforce is so otherworldly that the tires would just burst. Piloted by the Active Control Unit, thousands of times a second, the active aero recalibrates the suspension, damping and form of the car.

Responding like a reflex to live inputs from driver, road and aerodynamic load, to bleed off excess downforce and keep it within limits the tyres can take. A technical marvel with seventeen different actuators powering the hydraulics. As well as three different controllers – skyhook, groundhook and aerohook – finetuning damping force to improve the dynamics of its F1® derived double wishbone suspension. Arming the Aston Martin Valkyrie with virtually no body roll blending breath-stealing cornering with heart-stopping straight-line speed, and an ability to accelerate without pitch. Brake without diving. Make light of potholes and subdue the most undesirable road conditions. With military technology, military firepower and military precision.

The Aston Martin Valkyrie has a 6-point harness for a reason. The lateral g-force of this road-legal car is about 3.3g. The braking force is 1.9g. So every point of that harness is carefully placed to weld you in position and stop you sliding out of the seat. It might be important to put that into some kind of context. Lateral g-force is a measure of the acceleration when changing direction horizontally.

That is, it’s the sidewards acceleration of the car, felt in corners as you turn. The higher the g, the more mechanical grip the car has during cornering. The better the grip, the better the performance. Most road cars produce between 0.6 and 0.7g. Top-of-the-range sports cars tend to top out at around 1.1g. The Aston Martin Valkyrie produces 3 times that. More than 3 times the force of gravity raining down across every pore of your person. The wheel engraves new feeling into your palm. The contours of the seat cosset your body with more closely-wrapped intensity. You weigh three times more than you do normally. It feels like you’re flying and at the same time you’re heavier than you’ve ever been before.

An extreme work of modernity. Built from nothing, with zero precedent, to scream all the way up to 11,100 rpm. The most powerful naturally aspirated engine to grace any road car so far. So loud that every Aston Martin Valkyrie is delivered with helicopter-grade, noise-cancelling headphones to protect you from redlining your eardrums. But not deafening: an external mic on the outside of the car picks up sirens and other signals so you can hear the road through its 12-cylinder orchestra. How did we build something so impossibly powerful?

By starting impossibly small. Cosworth took the idea of a humble straight three and effectively developed a quarter of an engine. This allowed them to test and develop the combustion system they wanted to use on a scaled-down and more precisely manageable platform. When everything from chamber shape to valve angles and compression ratio was perfected, they took the resulting straight three, put another end to end, then two more back to back, to create the basic configuration for this V12 marvel. This approach allowed us to ensure that both the power requirements and emissions levels we needed could be hit. And what a spine-searing, bone-rattling hit. The V12 packs 154 bhp per litre. Reaching a total output of 1130bhp, with KERS assistance. While weighing in at a mere 202kg. If you don’t quite believe your eyes reading that: as the power revs up to 10,000rpm, your vision literally begins to blur.

How small can you make a brake light? Every bulb in the world has to carry a legal mark, showing that it’s passed the relevant safety checks. In our case, that legal mark defined the size of the bulb we made - the lit part of the lamp is the same size as the legal text it has to carry. That’s as small as it can possibly be. And that size doesn’t stop it from being incredibly powerful.

Two high powered LEDs point upwards, and we then use a lightweight periscope optic to bounce the light towards the rear. The result is, amazingly, the smallest and brightest high mounted stop light in the world. Periscope optics, a staple in submarine technology but not commonly used in the automotive industry, are also used in the indicators. The aerodynamic demands of the body left no room for traditional indicator housings. So our indicators are set in a long ‘z’-shaped pipe that uses periscope optics to bounce the light around two corners. This gave us the flexibility we needed to place the indicators in the car without interrupting the aerodynamic flow. So whilst the car may not quite see round corners, its indicators certainly do.

The Aston Martin Valkyrie is more than just a sports car. It’s a true hypercar, taking F1® technology to the road. That pushes obsessions with weight-saving and aerodynamics to all new levels. Every milligram counts, and everywhere we can reduce weight and improve aerodynamic flow, we do. All our cars carry the famous scarab beetle-inspired Aston Martin wings badge, and the Aston Martin Valkyrie is no exception.

However, the jewel-like enamelled badge used on other models presented two problems - it was weight the car didn’t need, and, as it sits proud on the bonnet, it interrupted the airflow, changing the aerodynamic properties of the car. The solution? Lay the badge into the paint itself. The Aston Martin Design Team created an aluminium badge just 40 microns thick, and 99.4% lighter than the aforementioned enamelled one.

Our original design was to have no windscreen wiper on the Aston Martin Valkyrie. When it’s moving, the aerodynamics of the car, coupled with the angle of the windscreen, mean the rain runs right off. But sometimes a road car has to stop at traffic lights, leaving us with no other route but to add a wiper. This meant we had to build a blade that would work in the most extreme conditions. At barely imaginable speeds. Bending around the hardly-believable curvature of the Aston Martin Valkyrie’s windscreen.

Without in any way spoiling its sublime silhouette. Yet again, we had a problem that had no previous solution in the automotive industry. No windscreen with that level of curvature had ever required a wiper. Our search took us to the US space program. Only a supplier for NASA could provide the from-another-planet performance we were looking for. A single blade. Every single one of its 594g weighted, moulded, scythed and sculpted into a feat of impossible beauty. With a torsion bar in the centre keeping it in contact with the windscreen at all times. Including when the car breaches 200 kph. And the wind rips up beyond 300 kph. How do we know? Because we took it all the way to Austria, to test it in the world’s fastest wind tunnel, the Rail Tec Arsenal. Just to be sure.