Aston Martin Valkyrie review

Sink inside the tiny tub and you’ll find you’re pointing two degrees towards the centre of the car with your heels higher than your hips. If you’re tall, like me, you might have had the slim, 8.5kg seat removed and simply be sitting on some padding fixed to the carbon beneath, back canted at a languid angle. I’ve been in roomier sleeping bags.

Click together the six-point harness, fit the steering wheel then press the Start button; once to wake the electronics, a second time to prime more systems and then, with your foot on the brake, a third time to start the car. This final press brings with it instant noise but it’s only the pancake e-motor prepping the 6.5-litre V12, which eventually comes to ebullient life after a leisurely two to five seconds.

With Track selected for the active suspension and Sport for the ESP, you reach up and pull the little hatch down, gently. No need to slam. This is the first Aston with soft close doors (it’s an aero thing to do with the lack of door handles, apparently). Pull the right hand paddle for first gear in the sequential dog ’box and then, despite the car having a clutch like a switch, you pull away easily with just a squeeze of the throttle. The reason for the apparently silky driving skills is that you’re still not using the V12 at this point, for the e-motor is doing the heavy lifting. It’s the automated equivalent of having a team of mechanics to give you a shove every time you move off.

But when that V12 does kick in at about 15mph, you know about it. The engine is absolutely animalistic. In this age of big numbers it would be easy to take 1139bhp and 664lb ft (1001bhp and 575lb ft of that purely from the V12) for granted. Drive something like a McLaren 765LT and you’d think nothing would feel like much of a leap after experiencing the boost hit. But the Valkyrie is another level. It is surprisingly tractable at lower revs but when you squeeze the throttle properly for the first time the rage it unleashes is incredible. Then you realise you shifted at about 7000rpm.

Hold the throttle wide open until the blue shift lights begin to flash as you hurtle towards 11,100rpm and you are in wholly different territory. Even with the fully active suspension set to Track, the most hardcore setting, you feel a lovely bit of squat as you accelerate, exacerbating the sensation of being in something military that might be about to depart the deck of an aircraft carrier.

The car is traction limited until the aero properly kicks in at 140mph or so, meaning out of slower corners it’s child’s play to light up the 325-section Cup 2 R rubber at the rear, hear the revs yelp and feel the car squirm. The first time it makes your heart skip a beat and your skin tingle, but halfway down the next straight you realise it was thrill rather than fright, so you do it again next time.

Once you peel out of the last long double right-hander and onto the main straight you have almost a kilometre of unabated acceleration stretching out in front of you until you need to hit the brakes. And this is the place to use the ERS button to give yourself the extra boost of 138bhp from the electric motor if you want. You might think you won’t feel it on top of the rabid 1001bhp V12, but you really do notice (not need) the bit of extra shove as you press the button.

The other thing you notice is how stable everything feels. The car will be generating about 600-700kg of downforce at this point, the active elements actually bleeding off downforce so as not to overload the tyres, and it all feels surprisingly calm given you are hurtling towards 200mph and a first-gear corner. With just 200 metres to go you hit the brakes, the downforce ramps up to its maximum 1100kg and you feel the lovely progressive travel beneath the ball of your foot. I was expecting the sort of rock solid pedal you get in a lot of race cars, but this has reassuring depth and makes the big carbon discs easy to modulate.

If you’re not used to it, the downforce in the high-speed corners is the most difficult thing to acclimatise to. It’s not scary, you just feel slightly inadequate as you realise you’ve reached yet another apex with masses of grip still in hand. But even when I did find myself correcting the car in the middle of the sweeping Turn Six, the Valkyrie was surprisingly accommodating. The steering is smooth and not quite as sharp as I’d feared, lending a calming, confidence-inspiring feel to proceedings. Tactility is a little hard to judge on track, so I’ll save any pronouncements about that until I’ve driven one on the road.

Talking of which, it is a hard car to imagine driving on the public highway. The NVH from having the engine bolted directly to the carbon tub is extreme. The noise inside is so loud that it seems to inhabit your head and it’s not the shrieking old-school F1 sound that you hear from the pit wall, but something much more guttural. Despite the clever smothering and smoothing efforts of the electric motor, the sequential gearbox with its dog rings thumps through changes and provokes distinct head nods too. There must surely be a small question mark over reliability given the complexity and although visibility felt fine on track, I suspect it might be more of a challenge as you try to negotiate the real world.

In short, the Valkyrie is clearly designed primarily with the track in mind. Of course it is. But the engineering to allow it onto the road is what I find most impressive. The careful, creative compromises. Yes, we have seen some wild track-only and pure race cars being road registered in the past – things like Aston’s own Vulcan and various McLarens – but that has always been on a single vehicle basis. The Valkyrie had to go through a much, much more exacting process.

That’s why the windscreen wiper (something that Newey apparently hadn’t originally thought necessary) took a year to develop and was sourced from the same company that supplied the Space Shuttles. That’s why the tiny high-level brake light actually had to be increased in size so that the small, obligatory Kite mark would fit on it. And the thought that the same crazy V12 that launched me between the floodlit corners of the Sakhir circuit is Euro 6 compliant is incredible.

It might have been a long time coming. It might be somewhere between an XJR-15 and a BAC Mono in terms of practicality. It might make more sense to many to simply buy a race car. But I think it’s brilliant that the Valkyrie exists at all.