Ride of the Valkyrie

Things don’t always run to plan when it comes to rare groove prototype hypercars, and that’s especially true when the world is watching.

I arrive at the Goodwood Festival of Speed for a passenger ride in the world’s most extreme road-legal hypercar knowing that the Aston Martin Valkyrie very publicly failed to reach the top of the course the day before. I’m meant to be riding shotgun with company CEO Tobias Moers, and the company knows another breakdown with him driving would be something close to a PR disaster, especially with a journo in the passenger seat.

Unsurprisingly, Moers opts out of driving in the day’s first Supercar Run, subbing in Darren Turner to do the honours instead. Turner is Aston’s long-term works driver and now high-performance tester, and will prove the fettled car’s fitness before the boss takes over for the second run. This being the English summer it is also raining, and as I watch Turner battle the Valkyrie away from the start of the 1.9km long course I’m not missing being in the car. Glancing over at Moers in Aston’s corporate hospitality, I can see he feels the same.

The long delays in the Valkyrie project haven’t made it feel less special. The car itself is basically Adrian Newey’s fever dream, the culmination of the legendary Formula 1 designer’s long held ambition to build a road legal hypercar to offer a similar experience to a top-level racer. It’s five years since the world first learned of the existence of what was then called the AM-RB 001, a collaboration between Red Bull Racing and Aston Martin. Back then we were told customers would be taking delivery in 2018.

Some of the subsequent delays were down to the succession of crises Aston found itself in after the company’s IPO in 2018. But more were down to the fact the Valkyrie was always going to be on the outer edge of what was possible, its all-carbon structure working with a newly commissioned Cosworth V12 engine, a hybrid system and boundary-pushing active aero and active suspension systems. The car at Goodwood was a prototype, but buyers should finally start getting finished cars later this year.

The late arrival also means the Valkyrie will be turning up pretty much as its parents are getting divorced. When a consortium led by Lawrence Stroll took control of Aston last year, the Canadian billionaire brought his Racing Point Formula 1 team into the fold, too – now rebranded as Aston Martin Racing. A technical partnership with a rival F1 team would be a bit embarrassing in the circumstances, so the Red Bull alliance is now set to end with the Valkyrie. Aston has already confirmed its second mid-engined car, the Valhalla - originally the AM-RB 003 - will now be developed in house.

Moers’ arrival as Aston CEO has also created another odd situation. During his successful reign as AMG’s boss he was the driving force behind the creation of the rival Project One hypercar, the one that is set to use a slightly downtuned Mercedes Formula 1 powerplant. Meaning that the 55-year old German is the only person in the world to have already driven both in anger.

Three hours after Turner’s successful drive the rain has cleared and Moers is getting ready for the second run. He’s wearing the serious expression you’d expect from somebody about to experience the Valkyrie’s 865kW, rear-wheel drive and cold track-biased tires on a narrow course that is still visibly damp in places.

Getting in is the first challenge, especially with a substantial crowd watching. Moers is strapping himself in and the space remaining in the Valkyrie’s cockpit looks impossibly small when seen over the tall carbonfibre sill. Entry means stepping onto the seat and then half sliding, half falling into the narrow footwell.

This is slightly offset towards the centre of the car and I find myself sitting in a raised knee position that feels more bathtub than sportscar. Yet it works – I fit – and with impressive headroom under the gullwing door. (The car was sized to accommodate the 6-foot 4-inch frame of Aston’s creative director Marek Reichman.) I will need to tuck my left arm under my leg if Moers is to have any space to work the squared-off steering wheel. But it's more spacious and comfortable than the vestigial side seats in a McLaren F1. I’d gladly suffer worse to experience something so exotic.

The view forward is bizarre. The production Valkyrie is going to have five screens, two for the cameras which look down each side, another ‘virtual mirror’ on the windscreen rail, a digital dash in the steering wheel and a touchscreen on the narrow dashboard. The prototype adds a data logger to report on the health of the Cosworth engine, and there’s also a GoPro suckered to the tiny windscreen to record the run for posterity. The upshot is it's genuinely hard to see out, certainly from my side.

At Moers instruction I’m wearing earplugs before the engine fires, and the reason is soon obvious. The V12 cranks without drama – to the obvious relief of the anxious-looking tech who has been talking Moers through the starting process. The motor settles into an uneven, high-pitched idle that is loud with another 10,000 rpm to go before reaching the 11,400rpm rev cut. Buzzing vibration also makes clear that the engine is mounted directly to the back of the carbon tub.

There’s no possibility of conversation as we trundle slowly to the start, although the Valkyrie’s low speed manners are impressive. Moers manoeuvres out of the paddock without any juddering – the car uses its electrical motor at slow speed – and there’s enough steering lock to negotiate the narrow passage between spectators without the need to shunt backwards and forwards. The street-legal Valkyrie was actually driven to a local servo the previously evening for a fill-up.

Cars at the Festival of Speed run in batches and, as there’s no return course, they then wait at the top of the steeply graded course until everyone has arrived before returning to the paddock. Which means lots of sitting around. With the engine off and the doors open in the queue for the start there’s time for a pre-flight briefing. The prototype is running without active aero or suspension and in its softest, highest Urban setting. The variable traction control is also turned to its highest setting.

The run itself is brief, but brutal.

The Vantage F1 Edition ahead in the queue blasted off the line in a cloud of tyre smoke and with a jaunty amount of opposite lock applied. Moers takes a more cautious approach to getting to the Valkyrie off the line, getting the car rolling when the marshal indicates ‘go’ before feeding the throttle in. The noise from behind the cockpit grows louder and furiously angry and the car starts to judder with the unmistakable sensation of wheelspin as the cold tyres scrap with the greasy surface. This continues all the way through first gear, and the car is still shimmying through two brutally fast gearshifts.

I can feel the Valkyrie pitch slightly under braking for the first corner, and roll under lateral loadings – the suspension is definitely soft in Urban mode. But on the next stretch, the long, straightish bit that passes Goodwood house (ancestral seat of the Dukes of Richmond since 1697) the Valkyrie hooks up and Moers is able to unleash it. Acceleration feels predictably ferocious, but the g-loads are only a small part of the experience compared to the savage scream of the engine, reminiscent of an early 1990s Ferrari V12, even through a helmet and a set of earplugs. The high frequency vibration through the bulkhead adds to the thrill. I don’t know if the Valkyrie will be the quickest hypercar, but it’s hard to see how any rival could feel more exciting.

Moers picks a sensibly early braking point for the next corner, Molecomb, which is where the majority of the Festival’s crashes seem to happen. (It’s where Chris Hoy smacked up the Nismo GT-R that belonged to Aston’s then-future, now-former boss Andy Palmer in 2014.) There’s no drama in the first part of the turn, but as Moers feeds the power back in, I hear a flair of revs and feel an unmistakable jolt of oversteer, requiring the sudden application of some corrective lock. Moers clearly knows what he’s doing: he was a keen amateur racer in his 20s and 30s and a famously hands-on boss at AMG. But, with the limit found, he takes an understandably cautious approach for the rest of the course, working the engine hard to please the crowd but without attempting the huge speeds the car could doubtless deliver.

The Valkyrie isn’t being timed on the Hill, so there’s nothing to win. But plenty to lose.

At the top of the course, parked in the top paddock, Moers is clearly happy with the blemish-free run, laughing as he removes his helmet.

“It’s an unbelievable car,” he says, “If you drive it at somewhere like Silverstone you can push much harder. You can’t do that here of course. Traction is an issue, it’s true – you felt that – but handling is amazing. I never thought it would be so easy, I expected a really tricky thing to drive, but it’s smooth even if it oversteers. There’s no snap in the car.”

And how does it compare with the AMG One? “They are completely different, they couldn’t be more different. But which would I rather drive here? You don’t need to ask that, do you?

Adrian Newey also drove the Valkyrie in one of its other runs at Goodwood, while wearing a natty set of Red Bull Racing overalls, and I catch up with him by phone a couple of days later. “The cabin noise is higher than we wanted, I have to be honest about that,” he said, “but I don’t think we’re unique in this. There will be at least one other high performance hypercar coming out with the requirement to either wear headphones or earpieces.”

Presumably either the AMG One or the Gordon Murray Automotive T.50.

“Luggage space is also smaller than I’d hoped,” Newey added, “which is down to our inexperience of realising just how much paraphernalia is associated with modern road cars when it comes to emissions standards.”

But you’ll be unsurprised to hear that the Valkyrie’s creator still reckons it will be seen as a high watermark.

“I hope so. It’s a car that’s perhaps more targeted and focussed than other cars have been,” he said, “we didn’t do any benchmarking against potential competitor cars because we wanted to try and establish a new genre of car that was more track biased than other road cars have been, while still making it usable on the road. The analogy I always had in my mind was a modern superbike: incredible performance but you can take it to the shops. And you need to really have your wits about you or it will bite you. When you really enjoy it is when you get to take it on track.”