It’s not long until the world of endurance racing will be graced once more by the sound of a shrieking naturally aspirated engine, as the Aston Martin Valkyrie prepares to take on both the World Endurance Championship and IMSA SportsCar Championship.
The racer is based on the Valkyrie AMR Pro, a track-only version which shares remarkably few components with the roadgoing Valkyrie – itself hardly a sensible, refined cruiser.
For the Le Mans car – officially called the Valkyrie AMR-LMH – Aston and its works partner team, The Heart of Racing, have taken things even further, fitting an enormous, quintuple-finned rear wing with a central spar running along the car’s spine and onto its roof. The front end looks different, too, and while it’s hard to tell with the camo, we’d imagine there are some more changes going on both outside and underneath.
However, the car’s centrepiece is without a question its shrieking 6.5-litre naturally aspirated Cosworth-built V12, the only engine of its kind set to be on the grid in either series. Now, after various bits of testing footage popped up on the internet, we’ve been treated to our best listen to it yet courtesy of the Marshall Pruett Podcast.
Aston Martin Valkyrie AMR-LMH – front, in pit
Pruett, a popular figure in US motorsports journalism, was able to set up his recording kit just ahead of one of the rear tyres as the Valkyrie headed out for a test session at Daytona back in November. The result is 15 unadulterated minutes of hard acceleration and brutal downshifts as the car hammers around Daytona’s sports car layout, consisting of long flat-out stretches on the banked oval sections and big, heavy braking zones.
You’ll want to skip to around the 4:20 mark to hear the start of the run as the Valkyrie fires into life and rumbles out of the pits before fully uncorking its engine. For reliability levels, the V12’s redline has been brought down from the road car’s 11,100rpm limit, but it still sounds like a big, free-breathing racing twelve-cylinder should. It’s a sound arguably only rivalled in the WEC and IMSA by the thunderous V8s used by the Cadillac Hypercars.
The Valkyrie won’t quite be ready for the endurance season’s traditional start at the Daytona 24 Hours from 25 to 26 January. Instead, it’ll make its race debut at the WEC 1812km of Qatar on 28 February, before an inaugural IMSA run at the 12 Hours of Sebring on 15 March.
It dives headfirst into one of the busiest and most varied eras of endurance racing ever, with the top classes populated by the likes of Ferrari, Toyota, Porsche, Alpine, Cadillac, BMW and Peugeot in WEC; and Acura, Lamborghini, Cadillac, Porsche and BMW in IMSA. Genesis will join the fold in 2026.
Aston Martin Valkyrie AMR-LMH – rear
Those are some formidable competitors, but none of them use a 6.5-litre, free-breathing V12. We sincerely hope anyone heading to Le Mans this year is prepared for even less sleep than usual.
Read the full article here
