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.

 

To achieve this, they used a technique known as chemical etching, where a high pressure, high temperature acid is used to carefully remove material and create a permanent etched image in metal. The resulting phenomenal piece of engineering is then placed carefully into the paint and covered with six layers of lacquer to protect it. If you ever want to order one, it’s known round the factory as the lacewing, and yes, you can still have it gold-plated if you’d like.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

Tolerance of 3.5g. Speeds of 200mph. 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.

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.

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, and throbbingly fierce, 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?

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.

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