More on Aston Martin AM-RB 001

When does a supercar become a hypercar? Designed by F1 guru Adrian Newey is a start…

Newey’s first road car and the fastest Aston ever promises to show off Le Mans-winning speed, weigh less than 1000kg and to boast about 1000bhp when it finally rolls into private hands in 2019.

And even the road-going versions are expected to have enough track pace to threaten the front runners at the Le Mans 24 Hour race. Indeed, Aston insists the car would be so fast in its braking and cornering performance that it could comfortably run in the mid-field in a Formula One race.

The all-new Aston Martin AM-RB 001 concept, designed in partnership with Red Bull Racing’s engineering arm and Aston Martin’s own design team, is a lightweight racer for the road, dominated by astonishingly sculpted underbody aerodynamic features.

Its well-heeled drivers, who will pay between £2-3m for each of the limited-edition cars, will sit in a two-seat cabin with their feet pumping pedals almost as high as the steering wheel, though Newey insists it’s comfortable.

Even at that price, and with no top speed or acceleration figures quoted by Aston Martin, the car is a sell out, with Aston insisting it had 370 “clear requests to be on the list”.

For the record just 99 street-legal cars will be built. And it doesn’t even have a name, with the AM-DB 001 just a placeholder while Aston tries to push the actual name through all the legal channels.

There will be a small run of about 20 track-only versions that will be faster, lighter and boast more power, which is all starting to sound a bit like the game plan that’s already been used for McLaren’s F1 supercar.

It’s a valid comparison that wasn’t lost on Red Bull boss Christian Horner, who had the quote of the day after remembering a certain F1 and road car boss calling Red Bull Racing nothing more than a “fizzy drinks maker”.

“We have demonstrated that there is much more to Red Bull than meets the eye. I am sure Ron Dennis is spitting his coffee out as we speak right now,” the Spice Girl spouse (Horner is married to Geri Halliwell) said.

Straight-line performance isn’t the total goal for the collaboration hypercar, though, with Aston insiders hinting at a 0-100km/h time of around 2.5sec, though it refuses to quote a top speed. Don’t expect it to threaten the Bugatti Chiron, though, because Newey is more interested in making a road car that can consistently generate 2g of lateral acceleration in corners.

Aerodynamic demands have dominated the look of the high-nose AM-RB 001, with Newey hinting at using active ride height to maintain an even level of downforce at all times, on all surfaces. Aerodynamics have even dictated the use of a custom-built all-alloy V12 that Aston boss Andy Palmer insists breaks new ground in several areas.

Contrary to previously reported, the engine is between 6.0-7.0 litres in capacity, with throttle response, packaging and noise, vibration and harshness cited by Aston insiders as the main reasons it steered clear of a V8 or a V10. Believed to be built by long-time F1 supplier Cosworth, it also eschews the turbocharging technology Aston Martin has just pushed into with its mainstream 5.2-litre production road cars, reverting to high revs to gain more and more power.

Besides being all-new, it’s packaging might also be curious, as might its vee angle. The AM-RB 001’s engine bay is compromised between two huge underbody venturis, a very high floor and an extraordinarily low roofline.

“Fitting a V12 in there will be part of the challenge,” Newey admitted.

“And it’s obviously not just the engine itself; it’s fitting the radiators, the transmission, the fuel cell. There’s a lot to get in there.”

While the car will use hybrid power to achieve its crushing speed ambitions, its development team isn’t yet certain which type of hybrid system it will use, though it’s been toying with Le Mans-style superconductors.

Newey admits he is still running the numbers on the hybrid systems for the car, which will dictate which gearbox the rear-wheel drive hypercar will use.

“It’s fair to say hybrids offer a lot of opportunities,” Newey said.

“It’s how we use those opportunities.

“The honest truth is we are evaluating a whole load of different solutions. We haven’t decided. I have a personal favourite I can’t talk about.”

Newey has promised the car will not use a dual-clutch gearbox, though he hasn’t locked down what type of gearbox it will use, much less who will build it.

“The car should be small, light and efficient and if i look at things like the current double-clutch gearboxes, they typically weigh around 150kg. We are evaluating some different ideas.”

It will, in all likelihood, be designed in-house by Red Bull with its hybrid system built into it, then custom built by a low-volume maker like Ricardo (which does the Bugatti Chiron and Veyron transmissions) or Graziano (which does the unique transmission for the Lamborghini Aventador).

With the McLaren P1 and the Ferrari LaFerrari both at least 50 per cent heavier, the AM-RB 001 will be riddled with exotic materials, teases with a 1:1 ratio of bhp to weight.

It promises to be a nightmare for Aston’s Chief Special Operations Officer, David King, who is tasked with putting the car into production.

With a minimum of 99 cars and a promised maximum of 150 built, including the prototypes, King is getting a crash course in Newey-style F1 development timelines, with as much of the remaining development time as possible given over to improvements on paper before testing.

Production will be focused on left-hand drive models, but will offer right-hand drive as an option.

With Aston promising to put the first prototypes on the road by the end of next year, King visibly paled when Newey (only just) jokingly suggested that meant the car would still be being fiddled with in his office until about “September 17” before being released to King’s Aston team to bolt together in Gaydon.

To make it even more difficult for the production team, it doesn’t share a single component with any current production Aston Martin.

Newey is still testing and developing and simulating the AM-RB 001 on the F1 team’s development simulators and cramming data through its supercomputers, using the calibrations of its successful F1 cars as the goalposts.

The birth of the AM-RB 001 fulfills a life-long dream for famed aerodynamicist Newey, the Brit who has won world titles for Williams, McLaren and Red Bull, and it employs aerodynamic concepts he first uncovered in his university thesis.

“I’ve long harboured the desire to design a road car,” Newey told the adoring throng of line workers when the concept was revealed by Australian F1 racer Daniel Ricciardo on the Aston Martin production lines today.

“Probably since I was six or 10 i wanted to do a road car and I sketched them all the time.

“The formation of Red Bull Advanced Technologies brought me a step closer to realizing that ambition, but i believed we should work with an automotive manufacturer. Aston Martin was at the top of my list.

“I knew Red Bull Racing had the ability to handle the pure performance aspects, but Aston Martin’s experience of making beautiful, fast and comfortable GT cars is of great benefit to the project.

“I’ve always been adamant that the AM-RB 001 should be a true road car that’s also capable of extreme performance on track, and this means it really has to be a car of two characters. That’s the secret we’re trying to put into this car – the technology that allows it to be docile and comfortable, but with immense outright capabilities.”

The hypercar collaboration between Aston Martin and Red Bull only solidified over a meal of bangers and mash between Palmer, Aston’s Chief Creative Officer Marek Reichman, Newey and Red Bull boss Chris Horner at The Birch pub in Woburn, England, in February this year.

Newey brought a solid, but unfinished road-car concept to the meeting and he and Marek set to work on turning it into an Aston Martin while Palmer and Horner nutted out the business particulars.

“The AM-RB 001 is a truly remarkable project and something of which I’m extremely proud. It’s an extraordinarily creative collaboration that unites the very best of road and race car thinking,” Palmer said.

“As the project gathers pace it’s clear the end result will be a truly history-making hypercar that sets incredible new benchmarks for packaging, efficiency and performance and an achievement that elevates Aston Martin to the very highest level.”

Roughly speaking, the top part of the AM-RB 001 has been designed by Aston Martin’s Reichman in conjunction with Newey, while the powertrain and underbody aerodynamics were designed by Newey in conjunction with King’s homologation team.

The car displayed at last night’s reveal at Gaydon is not yet a runner, and neither organization has built a rolling chassis, but don’t expect it to be hauled off to the standard industry benchmark location at the Nürburgring’s Nordschleife circuit when they do.

Newey was scathing in his softly spoken criticism of the cars that have been tested there, including the Porsche 918 Spyder, the Ferrari LaFerrari and McLaren’s P1.

“I don’t know if we will benchmark it,” Newey said.

“I am not particularly interested in benchmarking at the Nürburgring because as far as I am concerned no real cars have been around the Nürburgring.

“We are really trying to think about it from first principals, particularly in terms of saying this is our vision of what this car should be.

“Something like a Porsche 911 is basically the triumph of evolution over a bad concept. It’s a bad idea and they’ve managed to make it half decent by a whole bunch of engineering. The important thing is to get the concept right in the first instance.”

One of the reasons for that attitude is that Newey doesn’t see the car as a rival for the Porsche, the Ferrari or the McLaren. The cars he sees as being closest to the car’s pace are the outright Le Mans LMP1 race cars, like the Audi R18 and the Porsche 919, which lap the Silverstone circuit fast enough to place in the top 10 in the British Grand Prix.

“To go to the next level, that would be a small production run that we will put on the end that will be track-only and it will be in the range of LMP1 performance.”

To get to that level requires an astonishing amount of grip, with the car capable of running on racing slicks (though it fits no existing FIA category) or on its custom-built road tyres.

Newey designed the most successful Williams in history, taking Nigel Mansell to his only F1 title on the back of trick aerodynamics courtesy of active ride height, an idea that will be revived on the AM-RB 001.

The underside of the car looks more like a boat than a car, with its venturis sticking up more than half a metre into the cabin area. As high as the nose is, it doesn’t serve as a funnel for any cooling for brakes, radiators or engine air intakes. It’s just there to fill the enormous venturis with air to make the AM-DB 001 glue to the road.

The venturis and the enormous, full-width rear diffuser do most of the aerodynamic work, though the clean upper body design does boast a very small rear wing low on its tail.

There is a hint of an F1-style blown rear wing about it, because the single exhaust pipe exists centrally at the top of the bodywork, just ahead of the wing, but while Newey admits he considered it, current homologation regulations made fiddling with the engine maps to force air over the wing almost impossible.

“Aerodynamics gives you the exhilaration of going much faster than you think really should be possible.

“It should be a car that does not feel like it’s going to bite you but it should be a challenge to master it, mentally and physically.”

Relying on underbody aerodynamics might work on racing cars and billiard table-flat racetracks, but it’s trickier on real roads with bumps and a lot more suspension travel.

“That is going to be about trying to de-sensitize the aerodynamics to variation and about the suspension system we use,” Newey said.

When asked if that meant active suspensions, he smiled, nodded and said “that could be one way we could go and we have experience in it”.

It’s not Newey’s first crack at a road car, though his last effort was purely digital.

“There is kind of an evolution from an F1 car to the PlayStation X1 car to this car. It’s about managing air flow around the front wheel and then making sure you have good quality air to the floor, the diffuser and the intakes,” he told motoring.com.au.

Unlike McLaren’s F1-turned-road car designer Gordon Murray, Newey’s AM-RB 001 will run air conditioning, a multimedia system including satellite navigation and the full raft of driver assistance systems.

“With the level of performance, we have to offer driver protection systems. We want it to be a car that people can use every day, which means at times they’re not going to be fully concentrating,” Newey explained.

“Of course, the drivers who have confidence in their own abilities and want to enjoy the car without electronic intervention will be able to do so.”

With LMP1 cars easily capable of breaking the ribs of their drivers in fast corners if their belts aren’t tight enough or their seats don’t fit properly, almost all of the high-wealth AM-RB 001 buyers will be more than pleased about that by about January, 2020.