The Aston Martin Valkyrie Took A Month Off Of Racing To Get Faster And It's Still Way Off The Pace

Aston Martin Racing and The Heart of Racing decided to sit on the sidelines during the 2025 Rolex 24 At Daytona race, because the pre-season November IMSA test proved the new Valkyrie AMR-LMH hypercar simply didn't have enough speed to contest the event. Instead of racing at Daytona, the team decided to take that time and run a few dozen hours more testing with the new car at Sebring in Florida to better prepare for its first race outing. Last weekend the team flew to Qatar for its final pre-season test session in the FIA WEC's full-grid scheduled "Prologue" test, and could see if all that time spent testing had paid off. Back in November the Valkyrie was only slightly quicker than the LMP2 field at Daytona, running about a second and a half off the GTP class pace. Has the Valkyrie become more competitive with millions spent on private testing, setup changes, and upgrades? In a word, nah. 

For the first time in a sanctioned test session, Aston Martin had two Valkyries on track at the same time. Across the two-day Lusail International Circuit test the 007 and 009 Aston paired up for 549 laps of running, around 1835 miles in total. That falls short of the 792 laps of testing that Toyota completed, or the 722 laps that BMW put down. Aston indicated that the car was running great and never had any faults during the test, so the lack of mileage must be up to the team making lots of changes. Even with all of the changes the Valkyrie is still seriously struggling to compete on lap times. 

The #007 car of Harry Tincknell, Tom Gamble and Ross Gunn logged the 15th fastest time (1:41.089) of the test, while the sister car #009 of Alex Riberas, Marco Sørensen and Roman De Angelis came in 17th (1:41.353) split by the Proton Competition privateer effort Porsche 963. Being 15th and 17th in a 17-car class is already pretty not good, but when you compare the lap times that Aston ran, it gets even less good. The pace-leading BMW ran a fastest lap of 1:38.971 across the four test sessions late on Saturday evening, tripping the timing lights a full 2.118 seconds quicker than the faster of the two Valkyries. 

"We were really pleased. It's taken a lot of effort and the team," Adam Carter, Aston Martin team boss told Racer Magazine. "To see the momentum from testing continue here with a lot of laps, the car running faultlessly and the team gelling. We look forward to competing next weekend. It's a very visceral experience to watch a Valkyrie on track, like on the road. It's very special."

The Aston Martins may look, and sound, the part of a fully fledged race car, but this entire concept is proving half-baked. The Valkyrie is the only car in the Hypercar class to be based on a road-going chassis, the only car in the class to run without a hybrid component, and one of just two cars alongside the Cadillac V-Series.R GTP to run without a turbocharged drivetrain. The 6.5-liter V12 engine sure sounds world-shattering, but that makes for a difficult recipe in the current rulebook. 

Based on the fact that Aston was actually closer to its competition from a time perspective around the longer Daytona course indicates to me that the lightweight naturally-aspirated Valkyrie doesn't have a power or speed deficit to the competition, as the Daytona course has a lot more full-throttle V-max driving than the Qatar track allows. It seems to me that all of the other cars are finding a lot of their speed from the electric acceleration provided by the hybrid electric motors. In FIA WEC competition, the hybrid Hypercars of Ferrari, Toyota, and Peugeot all adopted a system that allows electric KERS all-wheel drive under certain circumstances. All of the IMSA-style GTP cars in the class, Porsche, BMW, Cadillac, etc., are running a less-powerful KERS system which can deploy at lower speeds and only powers the rear wheels. For Aston to have neither system could prove costly in race fuel economy, off-peak power deployment, and lap time pace. 

I hope the team can find a way to make the car faster across the 2025 season, but it looks like the Aston squad will be starting the season on the back foot.