‘Ideal’ track pack for hypercar
Mind-boggling options for 1130bhp Aston include a no-compromise circuit set-up
Aston Martin’s Valkyrie – the £3 million hypercar that has grown out of the Gaydon company’s close links with Formula 1 guru Adrian Newey and Red Bull Advanced Technologies – will be made available with the most extensive selection of ‘Q by Aston Martin’ equipment ever offered, insiders claim.
Aston’s unique personalisation service will include a special set of super-aerodynamic body panels, called the AMR Track Performance pack, which is capable of cutting circuit lap times by around 8%. The pack can be fitted to a standard car by specially trained Aston mechanics “in a couple of days” and brings the car even closer to Newey’s aerodynamic ideal but can’t be road registered.
The AMR pack features a different front clamshell that provides a major increase in downforce, plus replacements for all other exterior panels, a set of ultra-lightweight titanium brakes, an even more trackfocused suspension set-up, a set of matt black magnesium wheels and carbonfibre wheel discs to cut drag further.
Aston says the car’s aero package has been designed using CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and no wind tunnel testing, so final values for drag factor, frontal area and downforce have still to be calculated.
Buyers will be able to order their cars in any existing Aston colour, but four unique metallic colours are also being offered, along with three more lightweight paint colours. These add only about 0.7kg to the car’s overall weight, compared with the “3kg or 4kg” extra for a regular paint job.
Interiors can be trimmed in a wide variety of materials and textures, but most buyers so far are likely to take their cars with bare carbon interiors, with judiciously placed pads, mounted directly to the tub, providing support and comfort.
Engine builder Cosworth says the Valkyrie’s ultracompact 6.5-litre normally aspirated V12 engine – which weighs just 204kg ‘fully dressed’ despite doubling as a race-style stress-bearing chassis member – has already yielded more than 1000bhp at 10,500rpm on the dynamometer. Cosworth MD Bruce Wood has also revealed that peak torque of 546lb ft is developed at 7000rpm.
Combined with a braking energy recovery system (sourced from Rimac), the car should have around 1130bhp on tap. Given Newey’s early ‘1:1’ target – one horsepower per kilogram – this suggests the Valkyrie will weigh a little over 1100kg at the kerb. Acceleration figures are yet to be revealed, but in topperformance guise, the car is believed to be capable of around 250mph.
Around 30 Valkyrie buyers have so far visited the company’s Gaydon HQ to lay down their cars’ specifications, to be fitted to their driving seats, and either to choose track pack liveries or to configure a second car for track use. Aston expects to meet the rest of its buyers through 2019 and to deliver the first cars at the end of the year, before the even harder-core Valkyrie AMR Pro appears in 2020.