Aston Martin Valkyrie review

• Overview
• What is it?
• And what was the promised package? 
• How small is the cockpit?
• Give me some interesting factoids.
• Is it easy to drive on road?
• Would it be better if it was quieter?
• Do the flaws undermine the experience?
• Is that how the hybrid system works?
• Does it have rivals?
• What's the verdict?
• Mercedes-Benz AMG One
• Driving
• What is it like to drive?
• Is it as impressive around corners?
• Is it fun to drive though?
• And how about on road?
• Is the engine temperamental?
• Interior
• What is it like on the inside?
• There are modes?
• What goes on in the centre screen?
• Storage is a no-no right?
• Buying
• What should I be paying?

Overview

What is it?

Aston Martin’s F1 car for the road. With a little help and motivation from Red Bull’s F1 guru Adrian Newey. Announced in 2016, driven in 2023. The longest gestation of any car we’re aware of. And, behind the scenes, probably one of the most fraught. But it’s made it, with the promised package mostly intact.

And what was the promised package? 

A tiny teardrop carbon passenger cell with an all-new 6.5-litre naturally aspirated 65-degree V12 hard mounted to it and out back a clever gearbox integrating an electric motor. That draws power from a 1.8kWh battery pack supplied by Rimac. The powertrain is a stressed member with the suspension hanging off it, saving weight and allowing Aston to originally claim a 1:1 power-to-weight ratio.

That’s slipped. The V12 and e-motor still deliver a combined 1160bhp (balanced 1,000 plays 160), but weight has risen in the face of regulation, legislation and rumoured cost-cutting. It’s now 1,270kg before fluids are added. But still, one thousand, one hundred and sixty horsepower.

Downforce is the talking point, 1,000kg of it, delivered surreptitiously by using the under surfaces more than the top sides. The venturi tunnels are something to behold. The whole car seems to float above the road, perforated by empty spaces. From some angles you can see straight through it.

How small is the cockpit?

It’s race car tight. And access isn’t easy. A fingertip-sized button releases the lightweight door. It flits up and once you’ve wriggled over the wide carbon tub and down into the bowels (likely removing the steering wheel first), you can reach up and pull it down with a lovely ‘krump’ noise. It also has soft close.

You don’t notice, but each minimalist carbon wafer seat is angled inwards at two degrees. The upwards leg incline feels natural almost immediately, and your body is supported everywhere by bits of trim, the floor, the cockpit sides. The steering wheel doesn’t lift high enough, an array of screens provide your rear view with average success.

A central divider prevents the passenger operating the pedals, and further back contains the parking brake switch, hazards and a USB port. But nowhere, not even a pouch, to put your phone. There’s a slot where the crotch harness emerges from on the passenger seat that’s big enough for phone and wallet. Use that. Want more storage? You’ll have to ditch the legally-necessary warning triangle and inflation kit from under the nose. And yes, there’s even a first aid kit. It’s hidden in a slot behind the front numberplate. Have a shunt and it will be ready distributed for your needs.

Give me some interesting factoids.

The central rear brake light is mounted on a spar above the air intake. It meets all necessary brightness laws, despite being very small. But it should have been even smaller. The other legal requirement is that it needs to carry the EU logo and that didn’t fit on the light, so it had to be enlarged by 1.8mm.

At the other end of the car is the famous winged badge. It could have been a sticker, but Aston wanted it to be metal. It’s made from etched titanium and is just 40 microns thick. Thinner than a hair follicle and 99.4 per cent lighter than the standard Aston badge.

Is it easy to drive on road?

To operate, it’s very straightforward and undemanding. Mostly because there’s no clutch pedal to feather and stress about in traffic. The seven-speed gearbox is a single clutch sequential by Ricardo, getting this much power and 663lb ft of torque rolling would stress the clutch hugely. So it pulls away electrically, then bleeds the clutch in automatically around 10mph.

So yes, it’s easy to get rolling in, but the question should have been ‘do you want to drive it on road?’, because the answer to that is probably no. From the moment the e-motor spins the V12 to start it, and it settles into a raucous and penetrating idle, you’re sure of one thing: refinement is absent.

Luckily Aston Martin supplies the Valkyrie with a set of state of the art headsets with intercom. They’re not for show. And even then they merely filter the worst of the soundwaves. So you’re spending time in a cramped cockpit crowded with deafening white noise. The mechanical thrash is ever present, making it hard to focus on any other individual aspects of the car. Put it this way, we have radios to communicate with the photographer and film crew but unless it’s within six inches of my ear I can’t hear it. Mics struggle as on no other car we’ve ever filmed.

Would it be better if it was quieter?

Inside, absolutely. But neither would we have wanted any compromise in the car’s original vision, so maybe this is the price we have to pay. However, I also think corners have been cut slightly. As it stands the Valkyrie we drove didn’t feel completely finished. It wasn’t a matter of trim rattles and squeaks, but a more fundamental issue with the way it drove. On the Michelin Cup 2s Chris Harris and I first drove it on, it had little grip, the brake pedal has an oddly long travel, the steering doesn’t have much natural feel, the gearbox is slow shifting, there are considerable vibrations through the tub. In other words you have to manage certain aspects of this very complex car.

Clearly, given Aston’s well documented financial straits, development has been done on more of a shoestring than is ideal for a car costing £2.4 million plus tax.

Do the flaws undermine the experience?

Through corners yes (more on that in the Driving section), in a straight line, absolutely not. The Cosworth V12 is the best single thing about the car. Yes, it’s a pest when you’re idling about, but really this is a car designed for the track. A track with high noise limits, ideally.

As the revs climb past 3,500 the beast awakens, the sound changes pitch and tone, gaining focus and clarity. And then it just shrieks. The sound is Jurassic. Or 1990s Le Mans. You choose. Best sampled from the pitlane, in all honesty. Inside, weightless acceleration, and barely any need to deploy the ERS button for a 160bhp e-boost.

Is that how the hybrid system works?

Yep, you have to choose when to deploy it – apart from when you pull away. The battery is topped up via spare engine power rather than brake energy. And it can’t run on e-power only.

Does it have rivals?

The obvious one is the AMG One, a car with an equally long, troubled and at times doubtful back story, showing just how challenging it is to get F1 tech into road use. However, our experience with that car was much more limited and riven with reliability issues. We drove the Valkyrie for two days (a day on road and a day on track) and apart from some minor glitches with mirror cameras cutting out, it never missed a beat.

People will cite the Gordon Murray T.50 as a potential rival given it’s another car from the brain of a legendary F1 designer, but Murray has been clear his car is road-focused. The T.50S Niki Lauda, however, is track only.

Firstly, we need to celebrate the fact that the Aston Martin Valkyrie has made it into production. For a long time that wasn’t a given. Secondly, what a piece of design. The skill with which the yin and yang of design and engineering have been blended into a compact hypercar that’s lower than a Ford GT40, is remarkable. It’s a fascinating car to pore over.

Yes, there are issues, and likely they all come down to not having the budget for further development. But the truism of the rarefied hypercar sector is that the more expensive the car, the less money there is to make it happen. If you want perfection, buy a Toyota. So the Valkyrie, with heavy F1 input, compromises in areas we’re not used to. Cabin noise is the stand out.

But look, the Valkyrie is exotic and vastly exciting, contains one of the most thrilling, visceral and intense internal combustion engines ever to punch a cylinder and accelerates like a paper dart with afterburners. It’s fabulously single-minded and a marker in the sand to all that might want to follow. Time, we’re sure, will judge it kindly.

Mercedes-Benz AMG One

Continue reading: Driving

Driving

What is it like to drive?

It’s chiefly designed to perform on track, so let’s start there. It’s a different type of downforce hypercar than we’re used to, because it doesn’t carry a huge rear wing like say the McLaren Senna or the latest Porsche 911 GT3 RS. Yet while they both deliver around 800kg of downforce, the Valkyrie has 1,100kg, and develops it at lower speed (from 137mph) and with less drag. Instead of pulling a tall wing through dense air, the Valkyrie allows air in under the front and then thins it in those huge spaces. Same result, darn difficult to achieve because it requires so many packaging constraints.

Which is a very circumspect way of saying that the most remarkable thing about the Valkyrie is the way it accelerates at high speed. It’s relentless. I drove a very comparable car at Bahrain’s circuit a few years back: McLaren’s Senna GTR. From memory I think it managed about 180mph down the main straight. The Valkyrie punched well past 200mph. I then I remembered I’d forgotten to push the ERS electric boost button for another 143bhp…

Is it as impressive around corners?

That depends on your contact patches. Michelin Cup 2 tyres, which feel very grippy on most cars, were completely overcome here, feeling squidgy and vague. The more track-focused Cup2Rs were much better, allowing you to exploit far more of the braking and cornering potential.

However, it’s a car with a few issues. It’s clear that development money has been tight on this project. The brake pedal has reasonable feel, but too much travel, it’s hard to get an accurate feel for what the hydraulic suspension is up to, the traction control is clumsy and the gearchanges are slow. A lot of it is a matter of calibration and managing algorithms – neither of which is quick or cheap to do in a car this complex.

Apart from in a straight line, the claim that it’s as fast as an LMP1 car is very wide of the mark – and we know this because Chris Harris and I went head to head in the Valkyrie and the Valkyrie AMR Pro. Which is an entirely different car, shorn of hybrid assistance and much hydraulic complication, but gaining slicks and bigger wings. In a straight line there was nothing in it, around corners the AMR Pro pulled out huge gaps.

Is it fun to drive though?

You have to manage the car. You can’t bully it, it likes to be driven a certain way – calmly and accurately. Take it by the scruff and it’s choppy. It pushes wide through medium speed corners, and can get scrappy at low speeds. Always you’re waiting for the opportunity to unleash that V12. Which, it has to be said, is one of the all time great automotive experiences.

Sounds better from outside though, but the sensation of being in this small cockpit, experiencing the car’s high speed acceleration and stability, with this savage noise shrieking through the bulkhead is very intense. It’s raw, unfiltered and dramatic.

And how about on road?

The noise undoes it. The whine of gears, the gnashing of components, the clatter and vibration coming back through the unprotected carbon tub all makes it very noisy inside. It’s emphatically not a car for a road trip. It has aircon, and you can stream media through the built-in intercom system, but it doesn’t take the sting out of things.

Which is a shame, because once above a crawl it rides more than adequately. The suspension is frighteningly complex, using torsion bars and hydraulic actuators to separate out the forces imposed on the car from beneath (potholes, compressions etc) and above (downforce). But as we said earlier, the system needs more finesse.

Over speedbumps (yes it has nose-lift so will clear them) it feels loose, and even once moving you’re not quite sure of it’s behaviour. It’s a hard car to get your head around and to trust because it’s doing so much in the background – adjusting ride height, stiffness at each corner and so on.

Is the engine temperamental?

We spent a day on road with it, and it never missed a beat. The fact it uses e-power to get itself going takes all the stress out of dealing with a third pedal and sharp clutch, and the engine is tractable at low speeds. It’s a masterpiece – together with the design, it’s the standout element of the entire car.

Previous: Overview

Continue reading: Interior

Interior

What is it like on the inside?

Cramped to the point of claustrophobia, particularly if you decide to carry a passenger. I did for a while, just to see what it was like and could barely operate the car without nudging them in the ribs. Much less room in here than a Lotus Elise.

However, it’s a relatively small car, just over 4.5 metres long and 1.9 metres wide, and although you’re sat on the deck (the Valkyrie is just 1,060mm tall, 120mm lower than a supercar such as Ferrari’s 296 GTB), you actually have a reasonable view forward. You can see over the humps of the front wheels, the windscreen is deep, the A-pillars more slender than you might expect. Rear visibility is more challenging, seeing as it’s supplied by a trio of cameras feeding into three screens across the dash. Lane changes are a bit heart-in-mouth.

How’s the driving position?

Very good indeed. The slim seats are well shaped and because of the raised foot position (and tight footwell) your body is supported almost all the way to the ankles by floor or tub. But the steering wheel sits too low and, although adjustable, doesn’t raise far enough. It’s also a daft shape, but a circular wheel simply wouldn’t have worked in here.

All the buttons you need are on it: indicators, nose-lift, headlights and windscreen wiper, start/stop, neutral and launch control. The screen in the middle gives you all the instruments you need, plus warnings, and tells you what mode you’re in.

There are modes?

Of course there are modes, three of them: Urban, Sport and Track, selected via a rocker on the lower left side (you can also select the stability mode here). None of them makes the Valkyrie feel docile or quietens it down.

What goes on in the centre screen?

The usual: aircon, navigation and settings adjustment. There’s no Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. However, you can hook your phone up via Bluetooth and then get music streamed to the headsets. That works OK. The headset also allows you to talk to your passenger. You wouldn’t have a chance of hearing them otherwise.

Storage is a no-no right?

Unless you’re prepared to leave behind the owner’s manual, tyre inflation kit, tabards and first aid kit that legislation requires Aston to have found space for. Because it’s in there, most of it tucked in a tiny cubby under the nose, the first aid kit – as already mentioned – in a slot behind the front numberplate.

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Continue reading: Buying

Buying

What should I be paying?

Does it matter that the Valkyrie probably isn’t as finished as most owners would like? Yes, if they care about driving, no if they see it as an investment. And they will, because of the package: genuine F1 input, unique concept, Aston’s heritage, Newey’s design nous. There’s nothing else like it and there will only ever be 150 of them. It’s also a more complex and interesting car than the non-road legal AMR Pro version.

£2.5 million plus tax (a nice round £3 mill in the UK) for each of the 150 coupes. Beyond that there will be 40 AMR Pro versions, and then 85 roofless Spider versions of the Valkyrie (what Adrian Newey makes of that corruption of his original concept is probably best not recorded).

Lease rates aren’t worth discussing, because the kind of people buying these cars can justify them as easily as you or I do a few pints on a night out. However, even leaving interest aside (because that’s complex maths at TG level), borrowing £3 million over three years would mean monthly repayments of over £83,000. Money that would do the repayments on around 280 Vauxhall Corsas.

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