ASTON MARTIN AM-RB 001
Is this the future of hypercars?
The most gifted Formula 1 designer in decades and a firm famed for the beauty of its cars are working together to build a machine of game-changing qualities not seen since the McLaren F1. This is the Aston Martin-Red Bull 001, and this is the story so far
IT ’S NOT WHAT YOU expected, right? This is the AM-RB 001. A collaboration between Aston Martin and Red Bull Advanced Technologies involving lots of very talented people. However, it will forever be known as ‘Adrian Newey’s road car’. That’s no slight on anyone else involved, more a mark of the significance of the most successful F1 designer of all time finally diverting his vast brain power to a car that people – very rich people, admittedly – can actually buy. I imagined it’d be covered in those intricate aero tricks, flips and slits that give you a migraine if you stare at them for long enough on an F1 or LMP1 car. But no. The AM-RB 001 looks so pure and simple. It’s beautiful.
We’ll come to the design itself in a moment, and how the whole Newey/Aston Martin relationship works. For now, let’s concentrate on the outline details we have about the AM-RB 001. It’s a twoseater supercar but the occupants will sit with their feet above their hip-point – just like in an F1 or LMP car. However, it won’t be tiny and uncomfortable, and it’s built for fully formed adults, unlike most of Newey’s F1 cars! That said, it’s still compact for a car of its kind, being around 1900mm wide (a LaFerrari is 1992mm, a 918 Spyder 1940mm), just 4000mm or thereabouts long (a LaFerrari is 4702mm, a McLaren F1 4288mm and a 718 Cayman 4379mm) and less than 1016mm high (so lower even than an original Ford GT40). It’s made from carbonfibre, the composition and thickness of which (it varies depending on strength requirements) is defined by Newey and Red Bull Advanced Technologies. The AM-RB 001 will have one horsepower for each kilogram of weight and we expect it to come in at around 1000kg.
The huge power output will come largely from a high-revving, normally aspirated V12 that’s completely bespoke and shares nothing with the current Aston Martin V12 we know from the likes of the Vanquish. Neither is it related to the One-77 or Vulcan engines. The capacity is a mystery for now but considering it needs to output around 900bhp, we’d suggest it’ll be over 7 litres. The remaining 100bhp or so will come from a Kinetic Energy Recovery System. The details of this are still under wraps for now, but the electrical energy will also be used to allow the car to reverse – there will be no reverse gear in the main gearbox, to save weight and keep it very compact.
Suspension is inboard, pushrod operated and said to be incredibly sophisticated. It will feature variable ride height and work to make the most of the car’s aerodynamic performance within various speed ranges. Imagine the spring rate required to deal with the downforce levels this kind of car could generate and how that would work on the road. Quite simply, it couldn’t with a conventional arrangement. So expect an active suspension system, although again Red Bull Advanced Technologies and Aston Martin remain very tight-lipped about the exact make-up of the system.
We had expected active aero but the only active device will be a small rear wing that will trim the balance at high speeds. Even so, this car is truly an aero monster. Freed from the constraints of racing regulations, Newey has devised a car that looks set to instantly make cars such as the LaFerrari, P1 and 918 Spyder seem archaic, heavy and, unbelievably, rather slow. It has downforce levels similar to an LMP1 car, will achieve 4.5G of lateral force (on slicks, we presume) and Aston Martin claims that in track-only guise (there will be 99 road cars and a further 24 track-only variants) it will lap a circuit faster than an LMP1 car.
Let’s put that into context. Koenigsegg recently set an unofficial road-car lap-time record at Spa
THE HUGE POWER WILL COME LARGELY FROM A HIGHREVVING, NATURALLY ASPIRATED V12
Francorchamps with its 1341bhp One:1. It recorded a 2:32.14. That’s fast. This year’s pole time at the Spa 6 Hours race was set by a Porsche 919 Hybrid at 1:55.79 – some 36 seconds faster than the One:1. And the track version of the AM-RB 001 could be just as quick. Get your head around that.
The price of owning a Newey masterpiece? Somewhere between ` 18 crore and ` 27 crore, with deliveries starting in 2018. So far there are 375 people desperate to own one. Now the world has actually seen the 001, that number is sure to grow. Listen to Aston’s chief creative officer Marek Reichman and Adrian Newey talk about this project, as we have, and you start to believe we’re witnessing a landmark supercar. Does the world need a road car that’s as fast as an LMP1 car? No. Would we sell family members to be the first to drive it? Hmm, I wonder if eBay has rules about that sort of stuff…
Adrian Newey on the AM-RB 001
‘I suppose to some extent it [the philosophy behind the road-car project] harks back to childhood experiences. My father had a series of Mini Cooper S models and then a Lotus Elan. And the Elan was the family car. I used to sit in the middle on the transmission tunnel with my mother in the passenger seat and my dad in the driver’s seat. So I guess he proved that you could take a car like a Lotus Elan and use it as an everyday workhorse. He was a veterinary surgeon and used it on all his farm visits. Then, when I married, he gave it to me as a wedding gift. Between us I think we did 2,70,000 kilometres in that car, which is probably a record for an Elan.
‘To some extent I would like this car to be something similar: capable of extreme performance, but if you simply want to use it to go to the shops then it’ll be a comfortable place to be. That means it really has to be a car of two characters. That’s the secret that we’re really trying to put into it, the technology that allows it to be docile and comfortable, but if you want to take it on track or drive it very fast, it clearly has the performance to do that as well. In that sense, if it feels like an LMP car on the road then as far as I’m concerned we’ll have failed.
‘It is absolutely a fresh challenge, although in many ways it does embody my day job in motor racing: to package it very tightly, to get all the occupants and major mechanical parts into what is quite a small package and ensure that the cabin is still a comfortable place to be. That also goes into the drivetrain; how we do the drivetrain, how we consider the suspension. Unsurprisingly it has a reasonable amount of downforce – then you’ve got to have a suspension system that goes with that. The honest truth is that we’re still heavily in
the research stage. The exact specification of the car is still fluid and in many ways I like to try to keep that as fluid as possible for as long as possible, so that when we do go into the design and manufacture of the hardware, we’re hopefully right first time.
‘I wanted to create a package that was small, light, aerodynamically efficient. A good place for the driver to be, where he feels part of the machine – sounds corny I know – so you feel a sense of speed, a sense of occasion when you drive the car. So it’s trying to embody all those ideas into a single concept that does what we’re trying to achieve. In its track-only guise that will be a car that offers LMP1 levels of performance, but in a relatively mildly changed variant of that track car is a comfortable road car.
‘One of the biggest challenges has been the packaging of the powertrain with its associated cooling into quite a small back end that has a large diffuser on it. It’s taken a few iterations to get there. I label the big concepts Mk1, Mk2, etc, so this car as it stands is Mk6. That’s how many times I’ve redrawn it to get the packaging and the overall concept right. And then we obviously work with Marek’s guys to take that functional form and put the aesthetic there. That’s been a really enjoyable relationship. My first versions probably looked a little bit Group C-ish. Just putting some really quite minor alterations into the lines has altered the sense of the car without changing the form.
‘It is a bespoke V12, a start-from-scratch engine. It’ll be high-revving with a very high specific output per litre. The transmission that we then mate it to is one of the key areas of research. I look at the current trend for doubleclutch gearboxes and they’re just monsters. You’re talking about a gearbox that weighs 150kg plus. It’s tremendously bulky, and that is not something that sits with the concept of the car. So we’re busily researching how we do the transmission as we speak.
‘In some ways the aero concept slightly evolved out of the PlayStation [ Gran Turismo 6] X1 car. That was an enclosed cockpit, enclosed wheels, and the principles are an evolution of that. The target was to produce a car that in a track-only guise could be of around LMP1 levels of performance. So that meant it had to be capable of generating lots of downforce, and in its road guise there would be less down force than that, but also a lot less drag – so maintaining aerodynamic efficiency. In terms of the two versions, a lot of the main structures will be the same. All the primary parts will be the same, but the appendages, the bodywork to accommodate bigger tyres, the front and rear wing and diffuser will be different as you’re tuning it to a different target. It will be very much a recognisable sibling.’
THE TRACK VERSION COULD LAP A CIRCUIT AS QUICKLY AS AN LMP1 CAR. GET YOUR HEAD AROUND THAT
Marek Reichman on the AM-RB 001 ‘Before we started to talk to Red Bull Advanced Technologies, we’d developed DP100 [an extreme mid-engined concept that featured in Gran Turismo 6]. We made a physical model of DP100 and it went to Pebble Beach and Goodwood and the reaction was unbelievable. Even Gordon Murray – who happened to be the speaker one evening alongside me [and is famously unimpressed by most modern supercars] – said, ‘ You guys should make this.’ We had customers phoning up for the car, to the point we actually sold the model to a customer who just had to have it.
‘From that reaction, we knew that somewhere in our second-century world we should have a mid-engined car. And what should that look like if it’s not DP100? At the same time, Adrian was developing his own road-car vision. Andy [Palmer, Aston Martin CEO] came along and kind of aligned the stars. We wanted to use F1 as a platform but we didn’t just want to go into F1 without any reason. That’s not who we are. Christian [Horner, Red Bull team principal], Mateschitz [Dietrich Mateschitz, co-founder of the Red Bull energy drink company], they wanted to make it happen and to develop a car together, which is 001. So when we first met, Adrian had some ideas. It wasn’t complete but he had ideas. We had some ideas…
‘The first drawings were tiny bubbles that described the cabin. I was thinking about aerodynamics, airflow and teardrops. If I draw an elongated teardrop and then put a line through it, then that’s a side strake, isn’t it? Because that’s cutting through that form. So what you end up with is a big side strake and the form has just developed. And as soon as we met with Adrian, his desire was to force and push the air to the underside and our desire was to have the air generate beautiful forms, so there was a connection.
‘Simplifying reduces weight. A simpler surface enables Adrian to generate and direct the air where he wants it. If we came up with an incredibly elaborate piece of design it would potentially disrupt his aerodynamic vision. So it really is a desire to be as pure and simple and as close to nature as possible. And that’s his thinking, too. He talks about nature when he talks about the engineering, about aerodynamics in terms of the golden section and proportion. Those principles mean we’re not like anyone else. We didn’t look at anything else. We came at it from the science of performance and the beauty of Aston Martin. The first images didn’t have a big wing, and Adrian liked that. It’s about the negative space as much as anything.
‘All of the bits in dark grey, Adrian has priority; for the Sterling Green areas, we have priority. So the bit that’s forcing the air is him; the upper side, which is about beauty and legal implication, is ours. All of that is based on the perfect solution to get a one-toone power-to-weight ratio and exactly 50:50 weight distribution. Some of the parameters therefore you can’t move and change. It’s the lowest car in the world, for instance. Lower than a GT40. There isn’t a single piece of steel in the car, it’s all exotic materials. Again, why
Red Bull and why Adrian? They are at the very forefront of carbonfibre manufacturing technology. That’s lightweight structures, safety cells, combining resins and weaves that are completely unexpected and that nobody else is doing. It’s rapid manufacturing.
‘At one meeting over at RB I mentioned a section underneath the car that looked a bit square. I didn’t know if I was saying the right thing to Adrian, but he said, “So you don’t like that?” I said I felt it could have a bit more lead in, even though you hardly see it. We went to his office, there was his drawing board with tracing paper – a proper draughtsman board. He gets out his French curves, looks at the section, a few strokes of the H4 pencil, rolls up the paper and hands it to me. “Put that in CAD, feed it back to me and I’ll do a check on it.” So out of his head, onto paper, we made the CAD surface, patched it to where it should be on the car, sent it back to him and he ran the CFD and said, “Hmm, it’s about 0.2mm out.” I’ve seen that genius at work.’ NEWEY AND MAREK’S INSIGHT INTO how the AM-RB 001 has been conceived is fascinating. The inspiration and experiences each have drawn on, the working relationship that has clearly been established and the same vision both companies share for the car is a refreshing alternative to the many cooperatives in this industry that talk much but deliver very little.
There are, however, many more questions evo has to ask. It’s too early in the project to get clear answers now, but next time we sit down with AM and RB’s people we’ll need to know how, exactly, they will build a car for the road that you can drive to the shops one day and lap Silverstone as quickly as Mark Webber in a Porsche 919 Hybrid the next.
The most crucial question, and one that perhaps neither party can answer, is how do you train a member of the public to get the best from the 001? There may be enough who can afford the nine-figure price tag, but how many are prepared to withstand pulling 4G through Eau Rouge? L
IF WE CAME UP WITH AN INCREDIBLY ELABORATE PIECE OF DESIGN, IT WOULD DISRUPT ADRIAN’S VISION