'Does it matter if the Aston Martin Valkyrie can’t win Le Mans? Not one bit'
The Aston Martin Valkyrie isn’t that competitive yet. And precisely no one outside of Aston is bothered, as long as we get to hear it try…
It’s been a long six-year wait for fans who were eager to see – and hear – the Aston Martin Valkyrie go racing since the project was first announced back in 2019. In that time, the LMH project has been mothballed, restarted and now, has come to competitive fruition. Perhaps expectedly, the Aston Martin Valkyrie LMH’s racing career got off to an inauspicious start at the Qatar 1812km World Endurance Championship season opener this last weekend, the Heart of Racing-run Valkyrie LMH cars having a competitively unspectacular race.
Quite often the failings of these efforts can dominate discourse (just look at the headlines around Sauber and Audi in F1) but not so with the Valkyries. Any bemoaning of their pace, the reliability issues and silly mistakes – the choice to keep going flat-out while the driver’s door did its best active aero impression was an interesting one – is inaudible. Why? Because the sound of the Cosworth V12 fitted to the first road-based, road-first racing car to challenge for outright honours in sportscar racing since the McLaren F1 GTR, is still ringing in our ears. It’s thanks to the Valkyrie, and indeed the thunderous Cadillacs, that endurance racing’s top classes have an aural spectacle, as well as a varied entry list and competitive intrigue, to match Group C at the height of its powers.
From the moment on-track running got underway in the first practice sessions, we knew, win, lose, draw, or ‘retire in a plume of smoke’, the sound of Cosworth’s Dirty Dozen would define not just the race, but both the IMSA and WEC seasons for 2025 as a whole. Indeed, as the flag dropped on the Friday, the Aston’s effervescent vocals spilled out onto the circuit and rarely left the feed. Even when the cameras were focused on totally unrelated battles – a 296 against a Corvette, a Porsche 963 against a Peugeot and so many others – if one of the Valkyries was within 500 yards of what you were seeing, the Aston was all you’d hear. It became the running joke of the race, among viewers and indeed the commentators. Only once the car count dropped from two to one did the airtime of the Valkyrie’s howl diminish.
Car number 009, shared by Ross Gunn, Tom Gamble and Harry Tincknell, dropped out of the running 181 laps (well over half distance) into the race with transmission issues. The 007, helmed by Roman De Angelis, Alex Riberas and Marco Sorensen, managed to complete the race, covering 286 laps. For reference, the winning Ferrari 499P of Antonio Fuoco, Miguel Molina and Nicklas Nielsen – last year’s Le Mans winners – covered 318 laps, finishing 107 miles ahead of the remaining Aston.
Of course, Aston Martin exhumed the Valkyrie racing programme because it wants to win and as we know, these things take time. It is quite a strange car, though, by comparison to any other that it’s to face – a relatively heavy, inefficient naturally-aspirated V12, without any hybrid assistance and the only car on the grid to use a road-going car as its basis, per the idealist original spirit of these Hypercar rules.
Aston Martin will be learning from every mile the Valkyrie covers and indeed, every failure that stops it in its tracks. That a car managed to complete the first race will be taken as a victory in itself. That it managed a best race lap of within a few tenths of the Alpines and even the fastest Porsche 963 is something of a shocking bonus, though that perhaps speaks more to how disappointingly slow the cars from Dieppe and especially, the 963s of the vastly more experienced Porsche Penske Motorsport were.
We expect the team will find more pace in the car and indeed, the Balance of Performance will evolve to incorporate the Valkyrie and its relative capability. So there’s a lot of work to be done if it’s to know the taste of victory at Le Mans, or at all. From the perspective of car enthusiasts and fans of the sport– certainly this fan – our victory is that we get to watch and hear it try, given the whole project very nearly didn’t go ahead in the first place. Can the Valkyrie win Le Mans? I’m not convinced. Do I care, as long as I get to watch and listen to that V12 as it tries? Not a jot.
