The engine behind the British sports car-maker's $4.5m hypercar is gob-smacking... In fact the whole car is…
Cars like the Aston Martin Valkyrie only come rarely, so looking no further for the most gob-smacking car set to be launched in 2020!
The insane Aston Martin coupe is powered by an incredible 6.5-litre V12 built by Cosworth hooked up to a single-clutch automated gearbox designed by Ricardo. In effect a motorsport powertrain for a road-legal, two-seater, rear-wheel-drive hypercar.
Despite not having turned a single wheel in anger in the real world, few cars since the McLaren F1 have generated such rabid interest in the build up to its launch.
And can you blame us for our enthusiasm? Sure, Bugatti’s Veyron and the Chiron sequel remain monstrously fast in a straight line but here is a car that Aston Martin says will be able to cruise from London to the south of France in air-conditioned comfort, rock up at the Monaco GP and qualify mid-pack… On road tyres!
Heart racing
Even when it’s not moving at more than 350km/h, the British hypercar has the capacity to send the heart racing. Here’s a car that not only smashes the supercar mould but reinterprets how a hypercar could and should look to maximise performance.
Since carsales last visited Aston Martin, the Valkyrie remains far narrower and lower than a LaFerrari but, somehow, its designers have managed to gift it both shock appeal and beautiful proportions. And if you think it’s a stunner in the flesh, the true beauty of the whole project remains the single, bloody-minded way it’s been designed, developed and engineered.
While others worry whether or not their latest offering can accommodate an obese billionaire American, Aston politely tells them to go buy another car and if you’re wondering who is responsible for this radical departure and approach to the V12-powered Valkyrie, it’s none other than Adrian Newey – the architect behind F1’s Sebastian Vettel’s four world championships.
Recruiting Red Bull Racing’s Newey has been quite the coup for Aston Martin as the British Formula One aerodynamicist has been pivotal to the development of the Valkyrie. The, parallels to McLaren when it tasked legendary F1 designer Gordon Murray to oversee the development of the F1 road car are undeniable.
It’s Newey’s vision that has continued to push this stunning coupe to the absolute limit of road car technology to gain an edge over its competition, like the forthcoming Mercedes-Benz road rocket, AMG ONE and Murray’s own new venture.
Weight and aero obsessed
The Aston Martin Valkyrie project started with an obsession with weight, with the F1 designer telling Aston’s engineers that its first hypercar will weigh 1000kg and not a single gram more – that’s around 165kg less than a MINI One hatch, but with almost 15x more power.
In the flesh, not a single piece of steel, aluminium or titanium has been employed in the structure. Instead, carbon-fibre the material of choice – but it’s not just how the material is used, in many cases state-of-the-art 3D printing has also been applied to slash weight.
Rumoured to be an avid reader of road car regulations from a background in F1, as you’ll see in the vid, even the humble third raised brake light was reinterpreted by Newey to be a single powerful light-emitting diode, in a bid to cull the kilos.
The obsession with aero probably speaks for itself as few, if any, car-makers would be brave enough to first tightly package cabin space and then place the driver’s ankles above their hips F1-style to carefully optimise airflow beneath the body. Aston has…
And all of the clever air bending and unorthodox driver positioning is done without the result of any ugly huge wings or and over reliance on active aero. The Valkyrie team works to the principle that when the basic simple shape of the car has already been optimised there’s little need.
Bespoke mechanicals
Normally, if you’ve sunk the majority of your development cash in the aero, body and expensive carbon, the remaining budget steers you towards an off-the-shelf engine — something even Murray resorted to with his original F1 with a motorsport-modified BMW V12.
Not Newey, he wanted something box-fresh, hence the call to British engineering firm Cosworth – a company that cut its teeth in F1 and is responsible for the most successful F1 engine of all time.
From day one the Red Bull impresario knew exactly what he wanted: a naturally aspirated V12 that would weigh no more than 200kg but produce 950bhp (708kW) while meeting current all noise and emission regulations.
This could have proved the biggest stumbling block but Cosworth was up for the challenge.
Instead of painstakingly developing a full-size mock-up of the full-size V12, the crafty, resourceful band of former F1 engine builders, lead by Cosworth managing director Bruce Wood, created a quarter-size three-cylinder motor to see if Newey’s goals were even possible.
Using skills, techniques and racing voodoo accrued from more than six decades of building winning race engines, to astonishment of even Cosworth, Newey’s outlandish targets were possible and work began to rapidly develop the full-size 6.5-litre V12.
Stressed members
By then it was decided that in order to save weight the engine would be a structural component of the car – meaning the engine block itself would link and support both the front and rear of the car.
This was a technique used by Cosworth when developing the legendary DFV F1 engine but one that it had never applied to a road car that (even at 1000kg) would apply significantly more vertical, lateral and twisting forces than any single-seat racer.
In the end, Cosworth failed to meet Newey’s 200kg weight target by a paltry 6kg – but to make up for it the 6.5-litre V12 over-delivered in the power department, producing an incredible 746kW.
Viewed by many as a swansong for the naturally-aspirated road car combustion engine, the Cosworth can rev up to a stratospheric 11,100rpm, at which point the pistons are moving up and down as fast an F1 car’s. Yet, it happily passes the latest Euro 6 emissions.
Perhaps more impressive is each engine has been built to live for as long as 100,000km before rebuilds – 10 times longer than the F1-derived 1.5-litre V6-hybrid built by Mercedes-AMG ONE rival.
That 100,000km is also a conservative figure, consisting of flat out driving at the Nurburgring, Silverstone, heavy London traffic and highway cruising. Aston and Cosworth know as the development miles have been simulated by one of the world’s most advanced dynos – one that replicates the real car’s brutal gear changes as well as the forces generated by cornering at more than 4g.
Sadly, when we visited the combination of the mega V12 and its additional KERS hybrid unit (that boosts power and torque further to a mighty 865kW and 900Nm) had broken the dyno, but from earlier videos the epic sound generated from the Valkyrie’s powerplant ranges from demonic circular saw to full-blown F1 car from the early 1990s.
Cosworth claims it’s the greatest V12 ever. Appropriate since later this month its destined to be mated to, what’s shaping up to be, the finest hypercar since the original genre-defining McLaren F1.
Keyword: BEST OF BRITISH: The story and the engine behind the Aston Martin Valkyrie