Aston bloods hardcore AMR Pro
Track-only version of Aston Martin’s Valkyrie hypercar is rolled out at the Miami GP
Aston Martin has begun deliveries of the Valkyrie AMR Pro – the trackonly version of the V12-powered hypercar that the company says offers an equivalent level of performance to a top-flight race car.
While the Valkyrie project has gone well beyond its original timescale, and the
Formula 1 connection between Aston Martin and Red Bull Racing that underpinned it has since been dissolved, Aston Martin says it is on track to deliver more than 75 examples of the road-going Valkyrie and the track-only AMR Pro to customers this year.
At the Miami Grand Prix, Aston Martin creative director
Marek Reichman took Autocar through the changes that mark the AMR Pro out from the ‘regular’ Valkyrie. As well as a longer wheelbase, the trackonly car has a different tub with even lighter construction and some dimensional changes allowed by the lack of road homologation.
“The car was designed to keep the packaging as tight as possible around the constraints of a human and an engine,” said Reichman. “We don’t have a millimetre of spare space. It’s almost exoskeletal in its design. The tub is the structure, there’s no cladding in it.”
Veteran touring car and sports car racer Andy Priaulx, who has been a Valkyrie AMR
Pro development driver since shortly after the programme began, said he was very happy to be asked to work on it as his competitive motorsport career wound down. “To be honest, I didn’t think I’d get the chance to drive anything as quick as this again,” he said. Apart from testing a Williams F1 car in 2005, he reckons the AMR Pro
isn’t far off being the fastest car he’s experienced.
“Today is all about giving a taste of what the car can do, but the whole point has been to make it drivable. The guys who are spending their money on these are going to want to enjoy them, and there’s no point in making something that only a professional will be able to get near the limits of.”