Inside The 11.000 rpm Beating Heart Of The Valkyrie
Carfection gives us an exclusive look inside the Aston Martin Valkyrie his powerplant. The Cosworth developped V12 revs to over 11.000 rpm and produces 1.000 hp.
The Aston Martin Valkyrie looks insane in production form. But we haven't seen a lot of details yet about specs of the car. Now thanks to CarFection, we have the first details about the massive naturally aspirated V12 powering the beast.
They paid a visit to Cosworth to check out the 6.5L V12 producing 1000 hp. In the video below they start off with the sound and boy oh boy. The sound is unreal. It almost sounds like a Formula 1 car.
Cosworth was tasked to make the V12 which actually started out as a 3 cilinder engine. This made it easier to check if it could meet emissions and provide the performance as well. Once they knew what a quarter of the engine could do, the rest was quite straight forward. Also, it is the only structural engine the world in a production car. This means that if you took out the engine, the car would fall apart.
Packaging is the key
With Adrian Newey behind the wheel of this project, everything around the engine is so tightly packed meaning that the V12 also supports a lot of those elements. The radiators wrap around and sit just above the cilinder head architecture. The enormous diffusor comes right along the underside of the engine.
The front of the engine might look a bit plain but that is because this actually is a gear drive engine instead of a chain drive. Being that this car revs to just over 11.000 rpm. Cosworth decided that a chain drive would be too risky. They opted for a race engine approach of a gear drive engine.
The pursuit in weight loss
On top you find the beautiful looking carbon air intake with high polish finish. And as beautiful as it looked. Adrian Newey didn't like it. The 80 gram of the lacquer was too much so they decided to would become an optional extra.
But it is thanks to this obsession with low weight that they managed to keep the engine light. The target was set for 200 kg's. Which is very ambitious for something as massive as a 6.5L V12. But Cosworth managed to keep the Valkyrie engine just a few kilo's above the 200 kg mark.
A lot of the materials are ultra exotic meaning that it actually uses materials that you can't even find in race cars.
The Valkyrie is designed to be the ultimate flagship of Aston Martin that is still useable on a day to day basis. The engine spent over 200 hours of durability testing on the dyno with simulations of the car driving some laps around silverstone, the Nurburgring, Spa but also just sitting on a highway at 120 kmh. And that's also the reason why it doesn't use a carbon clutch. Because in day to day traffic, you'd want the clutch to be working as smooth as possible.
In the coming year we'll know more about the hybrid part of the car but until then, enjoy this walkthrough of what will agruably be the greatest V12 in modern car history.
