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The incredible mill isn't just the most powerful naturally breathing engine in a road-legal car, but it's also the highest revving.
Aston Martin Valkyrie’s V12 engine generates 1,000 horses at 11,100 rpm, and it's all naturally aspirated. The car is street-legal, and it was codenamed 'Nebula,' an acronym for Newey, Red Bull, and Aston Martin, which inadvertently reminds us of the astronomical connotation and how it applies to a car that flies as though its speed should be measured in light years.
The Aston Martin Valkyrie is a limited production hybrid hypercar collaboratively developed by Aston Martin, Red Bull Racing Advanced Technologies, and others like Dr. Andy Palmer, Christian Homer, and Simon Spoule. Valkyrie was conceived by famed F1 engineer and Red Bull Racing's Chief Technical Officer Adrian Newey who envisioned the world’s fastest road-legal car, a track-oriented supercar that’s just as enjoyable on everyday roads.
The British marquee reconfirmed that only 150 Valkyries will be made, describing it as an incredibly special car with an equally remarkable name. One that immediately evokes connotations of power and honor, of being chosen by the gods. In 2018, Aston Martin ‘disemboweled’ Valkyrie to reveal a naturally breathing Cosworth co-developed 6.5-liter V12 monster churning out 1000 horsepower in addition to electric motors.
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To properly understand Valkyrie’s godlike status, it helps that we examine its rivals: the Mercedes-AMG One and the Gordon Murray Automotive T50. In fact, Aston Martin Valkyrie and Gordon Murray’s T50 both feature very special V12 engines. Valkyrie made its debut lap of the Silverstone circuit at the start of the 2019 F1 British Grand Prix. It’s worth mentioning that Valkyrie has a Spider variant coming in H2 2022, and only 85 of those will see the light of day.
How powerful is the Aston Martin Valkyrie? We’re happy to introduce you to the car housing the most powerful naturally aspirated engine ever fitted to a road-legal car – 545 lb-ft of torque, precisely. That’s excluding the 160 horses and 207 lb-ft of torque contributed by the electric motor. When combined, Valkyrie boasts 1,160 horses and 664 lb-ft of torque. Peak power sits at 10,500 rpm, and the engine can rev all the way to 11,200 rpm. That means Valkyrie’s isn't just the most powerful naturally breathing engine in a road-legal car, but also the highest revving.
The car is a hybrid, like most high-end high-performance rides these days, but the gas-powered engine takes most of the glory. Calling a car a god sounds like throwing words around, but the truth is nothing about Valkyrie is ordinary. The level of engineering and craftsmanship that went into its aerodynamic profile drops the jaw.
Co-conspirators for Valkyrie’s development include Red Bull, Cosworth, Ricardo, Rimac Automobili, Multimac, Alcon, Integral Powertrain Ltd (now Helix), Bosch, Surface Transforms, Wipac, and Michelin. Their names define the roles they played in Valkyrie’s creation. The KERS-style boost system that mirrors those in F1 cars, for example, is thanks to Integral Powertrain – who supplied the custom electric motor while Rimac Automobili is responsible for the lightweight hybrid battery system.
The exhausts exit at the top of the car, near the engine, mirroring those in Formula One cars as well as the Porsche 918 Spyder. However, Valkyrie’s curb weight of 2,271 lb exceeds the intended 1:1 power-to-weight ratio with 1,126 horsepower per ton. Still, the hypercar manages to make 60 mph from a standstill in a blistering 2.6 seconds. The engine itself weighed just 454 lb, lighter than what Cosworth's 3.0-liter Formula One V10 would be if scaled up to 6.5 liters.
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Imagine making a street-legal 1000 horses with no boost. The block, cylinder heads, sump, and structural camshaft covers are all cast, but most of what's inside has been machined out of solid metal, including the "f1-spec" pistons, and the conrods, which are machined titanium. According to the automaker, it took a painstaking six months to perfect the crankshaft.
"Starting life as a solid steel bar 170 mm diameter and 775 mm long," explained Aston Martin, "it is first roughed out, then heat treated, finish machined, heat treated again, gear ground, final ground, and superfinished. Upon completion, 80 percent of the original bar has been machined away, and some six months have passed."
Well, creating a lightweight unit with a crank strong enough to handle a thousand twisters couldn’t have been an easy task. The marque deserves accolades for building a V12 mill of such power and rev that complies with emission regulations. Notably, the team initially developed a 3-cylinder prototype of this engine just to be sure they’re not off their rockers for imagining such a thing.
It must have helped to see someone else do same things as you. We’re referring to Gordon Murray’s T50 with a similar Cosworth-sourced 3.9-liter displacement V12 engine. In practice, the T50’s displacement should be 4.0-liter since the actual figure is 3.98 liters, allowing the T50 to redline at 12,000 rpm and tap out at 650 horsepower. Not as powerful as Valkyrie, for sure, but with 163 hp/liter against Valkyrie’s 152 hp/liter, Gordon Murray may hold Aston Martin’s gaze for a few seconds at least.
Surely, being the most power-dense roadcar engine with zero forced induction counts for something even in the presence of the most powerful naturally aspirated engine in the world of road cars. Nevertheless, squeezing a thousand horses out of a production ICE is no joke. Hats off to Bugatti for being the first to achieve this feat with the Veyron in 2005. It was a batshit crazy idea back then, but the birth of Veyron unleashed a slew of hypercars that dared to dream.
But then again, Veyron managed its output of nearly 1000 horsepower supported by four turbochargers. Subsequent dreamers that built on Veyron’s momentum incorporated electric powertrains. Not that electric powerplants of such enormous power are a piece of cake, but it still doesn't compare to achieving a similar feat in a combustion engine.
There’s also the seemingly ignorable but potentially colossal downside to electrics and turbos; they lack that soundtrack that purists just can’t help but notice its absence. No surprise in a gearhead’s preference for a naturally breathing 700-hp mill over a 1000-hp quad-turbo.
So, Aston Martin’s head was in the right place when it approached Cosworth requesting a naturally aspirated 1000-hp V12 that could be homologated for the road. Cosworth delivered, and Aston Martin achieved what it described as “the ultimate expression of the internal combustion engine.” Indeed, the Aston Martin wings symbolize speed, freedom, dreams, and exploration.
Philip Uwaoma, this bearded black male from Nigeria, is fast approaching two million words in articles published on various websites, including toylist.com, rehabaid.com, and autoquarterly.com. After not getting credit for his work on Auto Quarterly, Philip is now convinced that ghostwriting sucks. He has no dog, no wife- yet- and he loves Rolls Royce a little too much.