Aston Martin Valkyrie Hypercar to race at Le Mans from 2025
Le Mans News
- Last updated: October 11th 2023
Aston Martin has restarted its Valkyrie Hypercar programme and will return to top-level competition at Le Mans in 2025, with plans to compete in both WEC and IMSA championships
Aston Martin will fight for outright victory at Le Mans in 2025 after restarting the Valkyrie Hypercar programme that it paused three years ago.
The 6.5-litre V12-powered machine will enter both the World Endurance Championship and IMSA SportsCar series, more than ten years since Aston Martin last ran in Le Mans’ top class and 64 years since the British brand won overall.
The Valkyrie was designed by road-car stylist Miles Nurnberger, with the help of Adrian Newey, and was originally slated to compete with Toyota in 2021 — the very first season of the Hypercar regulations. But the company’s troubled finances, coupled with new owner Lawrence Stroll’s F1 ambitions, brought development to a halt in 2020.
In recent years, Stroll had indicated that he was keen to see the Valkyrie race and has now announced that it will take on the might of Ferrari, Toyota, Porsche, BMW and many more at La Sarthe for the world’s greatest endurance race.
“We have been present at Le Mans since the earliest days, and through those glorious endeavours we succeeded in winning Le Mans in 1959 and our class 19 times over the past 95 years,” said Stroll.
“Now we return to the scene of those first triumphs aiming to write new history with a racing prototype inspired by the fastest production car Aston Martin has ever built.”
After the Hypercar was put on ice, work continued on a customer version: the road-going car retained the full carbon fibre chassis and bodywork, and gained a hybrid system. There then followed a more extreme AMR Pro track car, which adopted chassis, aerodynamics and powertrain enhancements developed for the Le Mans car.
Aston Martin says that it will adapt the AMR Pro to the current Hypercar regulations, retaining the car’s non-hybrid V12 Cosworth in contrast to most competitors, including Ferrari and Toyota, which use hybrid systems.
Stroll said that engineers working on the Valkyrie would use the F1 team’s “knowledge base” to enhance the Hypercar’s capabilities, and that the endurance programme will in turn feed information into the road car projects.
The team will be run by The Heart of Racing squad, which has GT experience in WEC, IMSA and other sports car series.
Aston Martin also reaffirmed its commitment to GT racing, announcing that it will build new GT3 and GT4 cars, based on its existing Vantage, for the 2024 season when GT3 regulations replace the GTE class in WEC.
Though Aston has just a single outright victory at the blue riband sports car race, it’s one which has endured in the memory after a steely drive by future Ford GT40 mastermind Carroll Shelby and British sports car ace Roy Salvadori. The manufacturer’s endurance presence and reputation has since been maintained by its successful GT operation.
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Since its sole victory in ’59, the famous British marque has had a number of high-profile top class failures, including the Nimrod NRA/C2 and AMR-1 Group C machines, as well as the Lola Aston-Martin B09/60 and Aston Martin AMR-One LMP1 efforts – the last of which failed to finish in 2011.
The brand will be hoping to banish the disappointing memory of its most recent top-class car with its latest Hypercar effort, which will be developed at the new F1 base at Silverstone.
As it points out, Aston looks to be the only car manufacturer to be present in all forms of endurance racing, as well as F1 by 2025, but it joins a championship which Toyota is currently dominating.
The Japanese brand has already wrapped up the manufacturers’ title, and with one round remaining in Bahrain this year only its cars are now in contention for the drivers’ title.
