Aston Martin announced an ambitious plan back in 2019: enter a variant of the Valkyrie, a road car, in the 24 Hours of Le Mans as a prototype. That plan was later canceled, and the project morphed into the track-only Valkyrie AMR Pro. By the time its racing plans were revived by The Heart of Racing team, half a dozen of the biggest performance car manufacturers on Earth had already debuted their Hypercars. Now that the Valkyrie is here, it’s clear it has no problems standing out in a crowded field.
Through just one week of testing and practice, the Valkyrie LMH is not the fastest car in the FIA World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar class. The Aston has consistently been a few seconds off, and its unique production-based nature has led to speculation that the brand’s LMH racer could be uniquely unreliable in its first few races. While competitiveness and reliability remain obvious priorities in auto racing, this Hypercar has some other things going for it that elevate its cool factor.
It is important for the Valkyrie to be fast and dependable, of course. This is the reason racing cars are built. Whether or not it actually does become either, though, is somewhat irrelevant to what makes the car special. As the last high-level racing competitor on Earth with a naturally aspirated V-12, it already stands out even among other unique prototypes. Its connection to a road car takes this one level further.
Prototypes have been road cars before, but they typically went the other way. Porsche’s 962, in particular, was a popular target for road-going conversions. A brand called Dauer even used one of these conversions as a loophole, winning the 1994 24 Hours of Le Mans with a 962 entered as a GT car. The Valkyrie is the opposite idea.
Aston Martin’s furious hypercar was developed as a road car first, first planned in a pub as an alliance between Red Bull and the British brand. The goal was a road car more like a Formula 1 racer than any before, and while development may have dragged on so long that Aston Martin’s relationship with Red Bull had ended by the time the car debuted, the mission was a great success. With the help of a 1000-horsepower Cosworth V-12 that revs over 10,000 rpm behind the driver, a Valkyrie recently smashed Silverstone’s production car record by ten seconds.
The ridiculous V-12 had to be toned down for the race car, as did the car’s ground effect-style aerodynamics. The resulting Valkyrie LMH is actually less extreme, now capped at a redline around 8500 rpm and down a few hundred horsepower after dropping the road car’s hybrid system. It is still damn fast, and although practice pace has not been all that impressive, further track time and development should eventually bring the non-hybrid, production-based Aston Martin in line with the LMH and LMDh-spec hybrid racers it competes against.
While the Valkyrie may be the most spectacular car in both the IMSA and FIA WEC fields, it is not the only prototype that brings serious theatrics. The other naturally aspirated car left in sports car racing, the Cadillac V-Series.R, is notorious around the world for its big, rumbling V-8. More famous is what that V-8 does when the car leaves the pit lane, firing up on a bump start after the hybrid Cadillac rolls away under electric power. The boom of the GTP racer has become the signature sound of modern sports car racing, a title that could only reasonably be challenged by the Valkyrie’s screaming V-12 notes.
There’s also the Peugeot’s 9X8. It might not sound as good as the Aston Martin or the Cadillac, but it was the most out-there design the prototype world had seen since the Deltawing. The French brand ran the hybrid racer without a rear wing through its first season, racing for over a year under the belief that the car produced enough downforce in other ways to compete with its high-winged competitors. Peugeot eventually relented and installed a rear wing, but the 9X8 is still wide, angular, and completely unique in design from every other car on the grid.
All combined, cars like the 9X8, the V-Series.R, and the Valkyrie make modern sports car racing a must-watch for any enthusiast. All high-level auto racing features incredibly quick, highly specialized equipment. Only sports car racing can bring so much variety, and the LMDh-LMH convergence has led to a spectacular era that packs the field with memorable cars built by major manufacturers.
It is the strange sports cars we remember. The Mazda 787B’s screaming four-rotor, the Porsche 917’s ridiculous pressurized tube frame, and the Audi R18’s flywheel hybrid system live on in the memories of fans long after their racing days have ended. The same will be true for many cars from this generation, which just might be the golden age of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Fred Smith’s love of cars comes from his fascination with auto racing. Unfortunately, that passion led him to daily drive a high-mileage, first-year Porsche Panamera. He is still thinking about the last lap of the 2011 Indianapolis 500.
