Aston Martin, that plucky British sportscar manufacturer that has such a way with beautifully designed cars, have recently pulled the wraps off their newest production model, the DB11 at the Geneva Motor Show earlier this month.
Wasting no time, it has announced that a new hypercar is in the works, and that they’re getting help from the motorsport wizards at Red Bull. That’s Red Bull Racing, mind you, not the energy drink that they’re named after – because that would be weird.
Adrian Newey, Red Bull Racing’s Chief Technical Officer, and Marek Reichman, Aston Martin’s Chief Creative Officer have inked an “Innovation Partnership” between the two entities, marking the official start of Project AM-RB-001, and journey with a planned ending in 2018, which is when they’re reported to have the car ready for unveil.
Aston Martin CEO Dr Andy Palmer said: “Formula One offers the ultimate global stage to build wider awareness of the Aston Martin brand. However, this partnership will deliver even more than that when the hypercar that Aston Martin and Adrian Newey are in the process of developing hits the road.
There isn’t much to say about this forthcoming hypercar other that, being a conceived as a hypercar, it should be ridiculously fast. As you can tell by the teaser, you’ve probably cannot tell much from it. Neither can we.
Mr Newey does have, probably more than any single person on the current F1 grid of teams, an unmatched amount of expertise and experience with engineering very fast machines, being largely credited with the cars that propelled Sebastian Vettel to four world championships.
And with the entire Red Bull Racing mindshare behind the project, the inclusion of Formula 1-derived technologies finding their way into the AM-RB-001 is an easy certainty.
Both Red Bull and Aston Martin have been going back and forth for at least a good year now, with reports of Aston pursuing a return to the Formula 1 grid as the teams technical partner and title sponsor. From both camps, there have been plenty of talk, but perhaps all that commotion was about this hypercar project instead of anything concrete related to motorsport.
As nice of a story as it might have seemed, it looks like these brewings reveal that Aston Martin’s hypercar ambitions did not just come about from having a stroll through the 2016 Geneva Motor Show and feeling a pang of envy at Bugatti’s Chiron or the Koenigsegg Regera.
