Aston Martin’s 1100hp hypercar will not hit the road for months, but thanks to F1 technology we’ve already driven it
- The question is, is it flat?
- Hypercar games
- The ultimate hypercar
- Exotic warm-up
- Valkyrie switch
- Maximum aero
- Sim or real?
It doesn’t look like much on the map. The tiniest of kinks in an otherwise straight chunk of road. But when it looms into view and you’ve got your right foot buried so far into the throttle you feel like your toe is about to poke through the bulkhead, Eau Rouge, the legendary uphill corner at Belgium’s Spa Francorchamps circuit is as intimidating as they come.
Red Bull Simulator
Milton Keynes, UK
The question is, is it flat?
Through the left hand twist at the bottom of the hill and halfway up the climb it looks like it might be. But as I reach the top of the hill, see the road jink right ahead of me and feed in some steering, I feel the rear end yaw round sickeningly.
At these speeds – we’re deep into fifth gear – there’s no chance of saving it and I launch through the barriers and into the trees.
Flat through Eau Rouge? Flat wrong, it turns out.
Hypercar games
Fortunately, we’re not at Eau Rouge sitting in a mangled pile of broken bones and shattered carbon-fibre. We’re in a small black room in Milton Keynes, a town just north of London, England, playing the mother of all racing games.
This is the home of the Red Bull F1 team and we’re strapped in to a genuine ex-F1 Red Bull tub that forms the cockpit of Red Bull’s state of the art simulator.
Real-life testing of F1 cars is almost completely banned these days, so the simulator is a crucial tool in the development of modern Grand Prix cars. But it’s also become increasingly important in the development of road cars, because of its ability to fast track the testing process. Compared to real testing, sim-based testing allows engineers to make changes quickly and without worrying about weather disasters playing havoc with the consistency of the conditions.
Until recently this simulator was being used by Red Bull’s F1 crew. Now, it’s being used to hone the dynamics of the Aston Martin Red Bull Valkyrie hypercar, the pet project of legendary F1 engineer and Red Bull Racing exec, Adrian Newey.
The ultimate hypercar
Valkyrie was conceived as the hypercar to end all hypercars. It benefits from all of Newey and Red Bull’s technical know-how, but also incorporates active aero and active suspension systems, both of which are banned from F1.
Behind the two seats there’s a naturally-aspirated V12 that spins to over 11,000rpm and cranks out 830kW. Oh, and they’re only making 150 of them and they cost $4.4m apiece.
Opportunities to drive one will be few and far between, if they happen. So when Aston asks us if we’d like to drive one in the sim, we flick our DRS and race over to Red Bull HQ.
There I meet the Valkyrie’s chief test and development driver, Chris Goodwin who was lured from McLaren to work on this, and future Aston supercar projects.
“Obviously you’re sitting in an F1 car, not a Valkyrie,” says Goodwin as he straps me into the narrow, claustrophobic F1 tub mounted on a platform above a series of hydraulic rams that will create a sense of movement.
“But the driving position, lying back with your feet up high, isn’t that different.”
Neither is the F1 steering wheel, which, like the production Valkyrie’s is rectangular and plastered with buttons and dials (none of which we’ll need to use today, thankfully). Ahead of me there’s a large, curved screen showing an image produced by three projectors.
Exotic warm-up
Before we’re let loose in the virtual Valkyrie, we’re going to warm up with some laps in an existing hypercar. Actually it’s a computer model created from a blend of rival hypercars. No names are explicitly mentioned, but given Chris Goodwin’s assertion that “you can probably guess what they are,” we assume they include cars like the Porsche 918 Spyder and McLaren P1.
Enough talking.
Goodwin motions me to stick the headphones on then retreats from the rig. I hear a whine from the hydraulics and feel the platform rise in readiness. Then a voice comes through the cans telling me we’re good to go. So I mash the right pedal and we’re off.
Although I’ve been to Spa before, I’ve never been on this side of the fence, so it takes a few minutes to learn the track, and get used to the lack of speed.
I’d been expecting the rig to buck like a fairground ride, but the movements are surprisingly subtle. Obviously they can’t replicate the real g-forces of a hypercar hurtling towards the horizon, so it’s difficult get the sense of speed. But they’re what you need to give you a sense of how the car is moving around, how the tyres are gripping and how the weight is shifting.
And it feels like it’s moving plenty. Unlike any real hypercar there’s no antilock brakes here, so it’s easy to pinch a front tyre in tighter corners when there’s less downforce helping push the nose into the asphalt.
I’m surprised by how much understeer there is, but maybe not having much sense of speed means I’m actually piling into corners much faster than I would be in real life. The really unnerving sensation though, is how unstable the car feels through the fast sections, as if the back end is ready to let go at any moment.
It does let go and I bin the car twice and have to reset, but eventually I manage to lower my expectations – and my speed – and put in some relatively clean laps.
Valkyrie switch
Now, it’s time to switch to the Valkyrie but I’m not expecting to feel much difference.
I’ve driven the 918, the P1 and La Ferrari on road and track. I know how otherworldly they feel next to ordinary supercars. Sure, they’re a bit heavier than the Aston’s estimated 1100kg, but they also tout clever aero tech and hugely powerful hybrid engines.
As I wait for the microchips to reset, I’m mentally working on what to say if I genuinely can’t feel any difference at all.
Two corners in, I needn’t have worried. Instead, I’m involuntarily laughing out loud and wondering if Aston isn’t playing some massive prank on me. The difference is that stark.
For a virtual car, driving the Valkyrie is a very physical experience. The steering is weighty, with a strong self-centring action. The brakes feel like a racer’s — firm and requiring a hefty shove to deliver their best.
The acceleration is brutal and the engine seems to pile on revs so fast I’m clicking the right hand upshift paddle like I’m playing the castanets. But it’s not the straight-line speed you notice most of all — it’s the stability. This thing is absolutely locked down everywhere and the liberties you can take are staggering.
Maximum aero
You can rush up to the slower corners, stomp on the brakes impossibly late to wash off a load of speed, then tip the nose into the curve and instead of understeer you get solid bite. In the medium speed curves, you can lean into the steering without feeling that gut-wrenching sensation of the back tyres giving up.
And through the really quick stuff, where you’re getting maximum benefit from that aero technology and connecting corners in one super-speed sweep of steering, throttle wide open the whole time, you really could believe you’re in an F1 car.
I didn’t need to see numbers to know I was quicker in the Valkyrie. But they were still shocking when they came.
Aston is keeping tight-lipped about the actual lap times, but did tell me I was 30sec quicker in their car. Some of that difference could be accounted for in me learning the track in the first session with the rival computer model. But not that much.
“In our testing there’s a 25sec advantage in the Valkyrie,” says Goodwin.
Spa is a longish track, at around 6.9km, but even so, 25sec is an absurd advantage given that a McLaren P1 with a pro driver onboard can almost certainly lap the Belgian circuit in less than 2min 30sec.
Sim or real?
So how representative is the simulator experience?
“Driving on the simulator doesn’t feel like driving a real car,” admits Goodwin, who’s been involved in 31 of the 55 Valkyrie dynamic simulator sessions that have taken place since the project began – in the process covering 8500km.
“But it does give you accurate data and can accurately replicate the way a car behaves. The final setup though is always achieved from experience of the way the car behaves on real roads.”
And that’s where our verdict will have to be formed.
But based on this virtual experience, the Valkyrie is going to have the sort of impact on the supercar world not seen since the McLaren F1 25 years ago.
Keyword: Aston Martin Valkyrie simulated drive