Enter Valhalla

Aston’s ambitions for 2018 and beyond are embodied in the astonishing valkyrie, f1 genius Adrian Newey's rule-breaking road car.

- Gavin Green 

TWENTY-FIVE years after the McLaren F1 reinvented the supercar, so another British sports car maker is set to do it again. As with the McLaren, the new Valkyrie uses cutting edgee Formula One technology to elevate speed and driver appeal. This time, though, it’s an Aston Martin that’s tearing up the template.

Aston Martin has never had a reputation for technical ingenuity. In fact, for a big chunk of its history, it’s been something of a laggard. Those meaty V8 Vantages of the ’90s, for instance, had the engineering sophistication of an old-school American muscle car, whose lantern-jawed styling they also mirrored. They also revelled in their olde-worlde heritage, from hand-wrought construction to Bentley Blower-style tally-ho supercharging.

However, the time warp maker has gone high-tech, and the new Valkyrie is being built to showcase the seismic shift. Plus, CEO Andy Palmer wants to expand Aston Martin’s range of super-sports cars, and a mid-engine Ferrari 488 rival forms part of the plan. As Palmer told MOTOR recently in an interview, the Valkyrie helps to ‘legitimise’ Aston Martin as a serious maker of mid-engine sports cars. “It is an important area of the luxury-car market where we have no track record,” he says.

Yet the most important factor in the Valkyrie’s gestation was Palmer’s close relationship with Red Bull Racing and with its chief technical officer, Adrian Newey. Newey had long wanted to design a road car.

“I’ve been wanting to do something like this for years,” Newey tells me. “Sometimes when I had a few idle moments I would doodle some ideas and throw them in a box where they have slowly gathered dust over the years. In 2015 I thought it was time to do something with them so I agreed with Christian Horner [Red Bull Racing team principal] that I would start work part time on such a project.”