Aston Martin Valhalla review

But if the engine is clever, the transmission is Megamind. Brand new, developed and built by Dana Transmissions and exclusive (at least for now) to the Valhalla, its key attribute is to have the rear electric motor incorporated within the gearbox casing, avoiding the limitations of mounting it either ahead or behind in the usual way.

Now, I don’t pretend for a moment to understand this so please don’t ask, but the e-motor drives only through even-numbered gears. So when you select, say, third gear, that only applies to the internal combustion engine because the e-motor will be driving either second or fourth. Yes indeed, the car is in two gears at the same time. I had that happen to me in a racing car once and the result was neither pretty nor cheap. How, then, this does not result in a pile of hot, twisted and expensive lumps of metal landing on the tarmac accompanied by an instant failure to proceed is neither clear to me nor the chap from Aston Martin whom I asked. But I think it’s like AI: you don’t need to know how it works, just accept that it does.

The chassis is made up around a lower tub designed and engineered by Aston Martin Performance Technologies, the consulting arm of the Aston F1 team, using Resin Transfer Moulding, on top of which sits a pre-preg carbon upper to produce a monocoque of what Aston claims to be class leading strength and stiffness. Most of the bodywork is carbon too. There is no mechanical link between the front axle which is driven entirely by electricity and the rear, and such is the location and configuration of the forward e-motors, the front suspension has its coil/damper units mounted inboard and horizontally, and acted upon by pushrods, which looks all very racy. At the back is a more conventional multi-link axle. Fast acting Bilstein DTX adaptive dampers, described by Aston’s Director of Vehicle Performance Simon Newton as ‘game-changing’ are fitted front and rear. Like all Aston Martins, there is no rear-steer.

Despite the Valhalla weighing about the same as Aston’s lightest current car, the Vantage, it has the largest brakes of any Aston Martin to date. They’re carbon ceramic and aided by full brake regeneration from the e-motors on the front axle and the one in the gearbox. Safe to say, this car’s going to slow down.

The aero package is immensely complex but involves a deployable rear wing you can see very clearly and a full length one at the front you cannot see at all. They operate in concert, adding downforce or reducing drag according to need. The rear wing can reach an angle of 51 degrees to act as an airbrake or actually go past flat and reach minus eight degrees as a form of straight line DRS. All up there’s 610kg of downforce which may not sound like much compared to the tonne of the stuff boasted by the McLaren W1, but actually the Aston deliberately restricts downforce above 150mph to reduce drag (figuring that no one’s going to be trying to corner at that speed) while the McLaren doesn’t get all its downforce until it’s doing 174mph. Remember too that downforce is proportional to the square of the vehicle’s velocity. Given that, the F80’s 1050kg at 155mph seems particularly impressive. If you care about such things. I’m not sure that I do.

The door swings up and open. Save the appliqué that can be added by way of options or the ‘Q’ personal commissioning department (Aston’s Marketing Director Finbar McFall tells me the average Valhalla transaction price is £1.1 million, so a typical option spend is quarter of a mil), this is not a luxurious cockpit. There are screens front and centre, the usual Aston switchgear, some trim and not a lot else. The seats are hollow carbon buckets you don’t sit on so much as lower yourself into. The driving position is more Le Mans prototype than road car, with your feet higher than your hips, but I feel at once incredibly comfortable in here. The seat slides fore and aft and can be set by your dealer to one of three tilt angles. And that’s it.

What I don’t like is the lack of depth to the glass house. It’s more Lamborghini letterbox than McLaren goldfish bowl and I’ve harped on before about the importance of being able to sense the extremities in a car as fast and wide as this. I think it’s that way because it makes you feel even more like you’re in a racing car, but if it gets in the way of your ability to experience and enjoy what it can do, it’s doing more harm than good. We will see.

Thumb the start button and the screens come to life but not much else. Then you remember you’re in Aston’s first ever plug-in hybrid with a claimed range of eight EV miles. If you want to hear the engine on start up, you need to select Sport Plus or Race mode. You can’t just pull a paddle and go, you have to select Drive first which seems a bit of a waste of time.

Anyway, off you toddle in your Valhalla, out onto the roads near the Navarra race track where the car is being launched. Thoughts crash and collide in your head all at once, few of them good. Over the shoulder visibility is poor, there’s absolutely nowhere to store anything on board, nor is there any space in the nose though Aston will sell you some tailored luggage that will fit under and behind your seat that might enable you and a significant other enough for a weekend away if you’re not planning on wearing much.

At once I think this a bad fault, which only gets worse as I realise just how epic would be a two-week touring holiday in it. But you’ll either need to send your stuff on or drive on your own. I don’t like the oblong screen in front of me, which looks like it could have come out of any EV, and you have to go into a menu to access the ventilation controls. None of this seems very Aston Martin to me.

Nor does the engine when it finally deigns to grace you with its presence. It comes to life not with growl, snarl, purr or thunder but with all the subtlety of dustbin lids being used as cymbals.

But now we’re leaving Navarra behind us on a short stretch of damp dual carriageway leading to the hills, V8 growling away behind me. And finally it starts behaving like an Aston Martin. Paddle up to eighth gear and discover that noise levels at any steady two-figure cruise (and some three) you like are admirably contained for such a car. It’s not quiet, never that, but while I imagine few Valkyrie owners would be brave enough to leave home without their ear defenders, in here you could be listening to me bang on about this car on The Intercooler podcast with the stereo turned up no further than expected. When a photographer jumps in to take a few pics, there is no more need to raise my voice to converse than in any other Aston. A Vantage at full chat might even be noisier.

Even so, it is the ride that’s currently sweeping the breath from my lungs. The Aston Martin folk may not thank me for pointing this out, but it seems like no coincidence at all that its chief engineer, Andrew Kay, is an ex-McLaren man, who worked on almost all of Woking’s output from the 570S onward, or that his boss, Vehicle Performance Director Simon Newton, is a former Lotus ride and handling chassis engineer. That signature suppleness, the way its body is allowed to move but never float, leaving you wishing your destination was somewhere far, far away – like Finland – is with you everywhere you go. It’s one reason the car deliberately sheds downforce at speed: were it simply allowed to accrue in pursuit of some ultimately meaningless headline, the spring rates would have to be put through the roof.

Something else too. The steering is fabulous, preposterously so for a car with a driven front axle and an electrically assisted rack. It just doesn’t feel set up that way at all. The biggest compliment I can pay it is that, about half way to my destination, I realise I’ve stopped thinking about the relative lack of visibility. It is so precise you can guide it through entry, apex and exit with no more difficulty than were it a toy you could pick up and place with your hand. It really is that good. Riding on bespoke Michelin Pilot Sport 5S tyres – rather than the Cup 2 option which we’ll leave for a drier day – feel floods your fingers as confidence erupts in your brain.

The roads around here are perfect for really testing this car’s mettle – short straights flowing into complex combinations of bends, with camber and surface changes regularly thrown in and, above all, really quiet. You can’t use all the performance of course, it would be absurd to try in public, but the way you can guide it with your fingertips, the Bilsteins absolute masters of the body they control, is nothing less than mesmerising. Those ceramic discs are no more or less crushingly powerful than their specification suggests and as you brake ever deeper into each corner, you can sense the car understanding what you’re trying to achieve and using its natural agility and active torque vectoring to orient itself in line with your instructions.

This, then, is the kind of a car you don’t just jump out of when you get to where you’re going. You want to sit and savour; to listen to it as it cools down; to replay the last half hour in your head as if to cement it in your brain for all time. And you’ve not even been on track in it yet.

Navarra is both easy and hard. Easy because despite its numerous turns even a dullard like me appears able to remember which way it goes, hard because it comprises every kind of turn, some gradient and surfaces changes where new track meets old which when wet can cause momentary changes in grip levels akin to swapping your fat new Michelins for a set of worn out space savers. So at least in conditions like this, you need to have your wits about you.

Commonsense tells you to select Race mode, which maximises downforce and actually trims back the amount of electrical power delivered to make sure it can be maintained right around the lap, but Sport+ not only gives you the lot, but also allows a certain, shall we say, freedom of expression in the corners, especially if you wind back the traction control intervention point to one of its more sporting 10 positions.

The performance is what you expect: thrilling but not necessarily any more or less so than you’d expect given what we already know about the power, torque and weight. Flat chat the engine does sound good, but scarcely Vanquish V12 good, and the hybrid fill-in consigns lag to the history books while providing the throttle response of a naturally aspirated engine; but all that could reasonably be guessed.

What I had not expected was for this car to be so much damn fun. You look at it, learn about the aero package, see all that’s been done to ensure that, come what may, it is able to deploy its potential and could reasonably conclude that the way to drive this car is to keep it clean and keep within the broad spans of its natural abilities. That is, after all, how I fairly quickly learned the similarly configured SF90 demanded to be driven.

But it’s not like that at all. It seems a strange thing to say about a car named after the hall of the slain, but the Valhalla is playful. Really, really playful. Borderline cheeky. The downforce in the quick stuff is very impressive for a fully homologated road car so you really can commit and it soaks up the kerbs beautifully, but it’s the way it rotates into slower turns entered on a trailing throttle, allowing you to pick up the throttle at whatever angle you like that is absolutely delicious. Do it early enough and you just need to bring the wheel back to around straight-ahead and allow the front axle (which never transmits more than 25 per cent of the power) to pull you out in a fractionally oversteering condition. Leave it long enough, or just use the power to accentuate the angle of attack and you can treat this million quid, thousand horsepower Aston like your own personal plaything, there to do your bidding. And I hope plenty of owners do precisely that.

So to return to my earlier theme, allow me to answer the question posed at the start: does this mid-engined, two-seat, all-wheel drive, flat-plane cranked, carbon fibre hypercar still somehow feel like an Aston Martin? It does, absolutely and though I’ve never driven one (but remain open to offers), I’d bet plenty it does far more so than a Valkyrie.

What should an Aston Martin be? It should be beautiful of course, and it is. It should ride well enough and have sufficient refinement to be a viable daily driver, and it does. Above all, it should engage the driver, on a level far more intense than simply amazing him or her with its technical abilities. Above all, an Aston should be indulgent, engaging and at all times on your side. And despite its fearsome specification, the Valhalla is all these things. A proper Aston then? Yes, yes, three times yes. And one of the best there has been.

What about the Ferrari? By Andrew English

What’s in a name? Quite a lot as it happens.

‘Wow, warriors’ heaven,’ said my son Fergus on learning the name of the Aston Martin Valhalla. But it seems no more hubristic than Ferrari digging out its Testarossa name for the 849. Did the Italians think no one had heard of the reputation of the 1980s mid-engined flat-12 supercar, with a tendency to exit stage rearward if you lifted off mid corner?

Neither car had an entirely seamless development, either. Ferrari was on the rebound from the less-than-lovely-to-drive SF90, with which the 849 shares much of its electrical and mechanical specification. Aston Martin, struggling financially also battled to develop its first mass-production mid-engined car.

And it would be tempting to dismiss each as a cut ‘n’ paste copy of the other: both made of aluminium alloy and carbon fibre (though the Valhalla has a composite tub with aluminium subframes), both with V8 twin-turbo engines, both using three-motor plug-in hybrid drivetrains and both sporting power outputs comfortably over 1000bhp (1064bhp for the Aston, 1036bhp for the Ferrari). Performance, too, is similar, the Aston faster (217mph v 205mph), but slower to 62mph (2.5sec v 2.3sec) and allegedly heavier (1655kg dry v 1570kg dry).

Yet you might still ask why the basic price for the Ferrari is £407,617, and the Aston Martin £850,000.

Aston Martin points to hypercar rivals such as the £3.1 million Ferrari F80, the £2 million McLaren W1, similar in layout, capable of retina-melting speeds and acceleration and, unlike the Testarossa, strictly limited in production numbers.

I’ve driven both Testarossa and Valhalla on road and track though in conditions that couldn’t be more different. For the Ferrari, the Circuit Monteblanco was damp and greasy, the open roads soaked. For the Aston, Navarra was dry as a bone, the roads equally so. But some differences still shone out like the sun replacing the rain in Spain.

Neither sounds fantastic, though cacophonous at top revs. Both have a series of driver modes, which progressively dial back the formidable torque vectoring capabilities of the front motors and the electronic stability systems.

In the extreme Race mode, the Valhalla is more planted, with that sort of off-centre feedback which marks out British cars which emerge from the Gaydon area. The Ferrari’s extreme setting CT-off was good and reasonably safe, but gave less feedback, and the transition from understeer to oversteer was more abrupt.

The ride quality was also a qualified win for the Valhalla, with its active Bilstein dampers giving a more gentle response than either the Multimatic passive or active damping options on the Ferrari. But the Aston comes with a sting in the tail, namely its over-stiff carbon fibre rigidity. Not as bad as some carbon fibre cars I’ve driven, but there nevertheless. Just to say, you’ll feel the weight of both cars in rapid changes of direction, particularly on the road.

As far as the drivetrain is concerned, the Ferrari V8 rewards holding onto the revs to the redline, while the AMG-derived lump in the Valhalla could be short-shifted all day long. Easier to drive, but not quite as supercar-like.

Both are comfortable, reasonably easy to get into though neither has the last word in human machine interfaces; the Ferrari is better and a vast improvement on previous efforts. And the Testarossa is a lot more refined.

In the end both are very serious and enjoyable machines, but given the fantastical situation of having the required funds, I’d take the Aston. That’s not really a decision based on aesthetics, but more the way the Valhalla talks to you, the language it speaks when it does and the sense of control it imparts. In that respect it’s like a McLaren 650S or Lotus Evora 410, a mid-engined car which begs to be driven and which flatters rather than frightens. Which for any road-going supercar in general and an Aston Martin in particular, is precisely as it should be.

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