How Alonso played designer in Aston’s new limited edition special

Company cars and their spec have long been a measure of self-worth for a particular type of person. For the travelling salesman fraternity and their ilk it was a matter of life or death what letters appeared alongside the model name on the bootlid, lest shame descend on the family when the car was in repose in the company car park or the homestead’s driveway.

GLX for someone with a glassy corner office and a seat in the boardroom already in sight. LX for the thrusting young executive on the up. L – or, worse, nothing at all – if, like Jack Lemmon’s Shelley ‘The Machine’ Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross, the glory days are long past and all that’s
left is an Always-Be-Closing roast from Alec Baldwin. Third prize is you’re fired… 

Now imagine someone for whom the scribble on
the bootlid is an irrelevance – and yet the prospect
of a (barely) road-legal track car of which only 110 will be built, powered by a 705bhp twin-turbo V12, is… somehow lacking. No need to imagine. That person
is Fernando Alonso. 

“When we reviewed the list of things I would love to change,” says Fernando, “they said OK, maybe it’s better to make a full new car with a new name and we just make a limited edition.  

“So, yeah, I said ‘Why not?’” 

Aston Martin’s Valour, built to celebrate the company’s 110th birthday (hence the otherwise arbitrary-sounding production run of 110 units), was announced at last year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. Despite the (estimated) £1million price tag, the entire allocation sold out within two weeks – although Aston generously left the online configurator up for a while longer to sate those of us who can but dream.  

Its style is retro-clever without veering into restomod territory, clearly influenced by the likes of historic models such as the Vantage and V8 despite being moulded in carbon fibre rather than beaten from sheet steel. It’s said to be an explicit homage to a 1970 DBS V8 – yes, the model driven by Roger Moore in The Persuaders! – which was heavily modified into a race car by the factory during the 1970s, eventually seeing service at Le Mans, where it was nicknamed ‘The Muncher’ by mechanics on account of its prodigious appetite for brake pads and tyres. 

Much like his F1 career, Alonso made sure the Aston Martin Valour had no half-measures to reach his demands

Photo by: Aston Martin

Another niche fact about the Valour: until Alonso came along with a wish list of modifications long enough to warrant a new production run under a different name, it was the only car ever to direct twin-turbo V12 power through a manual gearbox. 

Hardened spec-watchers will have observed that the Valour’s engine has seen service in another of Aston’s limited-edition plutocrat specials, the DBS 770 Ultimate, where it output 770bhp; it had to be detuned for the Valour to avoid overwhelming the manual ’box.
This will not have eluded Fernando’s notice either, hence his request for more. 

Thus the Valiant, built to Alonso’s spec by the company’s ‘Q by Aston Martin’ division in consultation with the Silverstone-based F1 team, benefits from a 29bhp uplift while maintaining the Valour’s 555lb ft of torque. The manual gearbox, though, had to stay. 

“I think that this is a collectible car – it’s something I want to drive in five years’ time, in 10 years’ time, in 50 years’ time, and have the feeling of how everything started, how my passion for driving road cars started when I got my licence,” says Alonso.

While the Valiant’s weight is as publicly unspecified as its price, Aston has revealed that it cut around 100kg from the Valour while following Alonso’s mandate 

“That first moment you have the freedom of being alone in a car and taking the highway or going to a restaurant or something on your own is something
you don’t forget. Having the manual with a V-12 car
is something that I think has more appeal than having
a normal automatic.” 

The Valiant, as demonstrated by Fernando at this year’s FoS in a colourway based on that of ‘The Muncher’, is more exclusive than the Valour on which it’s based: just 38 will be built, at a retail price which is only disclosed to serious potential buyers with established wherewithal. This is an area of the industry which hasn’t forgotten the lessons of the aubergine McLaren F1, lovingly colour-matched (after the company’s special operations department scoured London’s vegetable markets to obtain a variety of samples) to one selected by a putative customer who then decided, when the car was ready, that he didn’t want it after all. 

Alonso’s summary of his wish list was he wanted a “more extreme, race-car inspired version” of the Valour. So, along with the power uplift, the car went on a strict diet while gaining downforce-generating aero elements such as a multi-plane front splitter and a reprofiled rear end including a fixed rear wing and diffuser. 

The Valour, equipped with a rear wing and diffuser is a road car ready to race

Photo by: Aston Martin

Losing weight is an expensive business. The super-rarefied sports car sector is one of those rare counter-intuitive zones where customers readily pay more for less. Arguably the first such car to make otherwise rational and deal-conscious individuals lose their heads was the Ferrari F40, with its Perspex windows and fabric door pulls. But think how much faster it went as a result of shaving off a few grammes! 

While the Valiant’s weight is as publicly unspecified as its price, Aston has revealed that it cut around 100kg from the Valour while following Alonso’s mandate. Around 10% of that has come from swapping the battery for a lithium ion equivalent; elsewhere, the 3D-printed rear subframe is claimed to save 3kg with no loss of stiffness, while fabricating the torque tube from magnesium saves 8.6kg. The new 21-inch ‘aero’ wheels, riding on 275/35 front and 325/30 rear tyres, cut the unsprung mass by 14kg. 

The stripped-out theme continues inside, where the new steering wheel has no switchgear mounted on it and the gearshift enclosure is cut away so some of the mechanism is exposed. The touch-screen display in the centre console is about as small as is considered acceptable in this post-Tesla world. 

“The normal answer is no at the beginning, but then the team is clever enough to find ways [to save weight],” explains Alonso. “The gear stick, to be exposed like that, initially was not possible because it was a big job, requiring change to a lot of the structures and things like that. But then now this is a nice feature. Some of the aerodynamic devices on the floor – the front splitter and the diffuser – were a challenge because for a road car you need to go over speed bumps. 

“Some of those [elements] were a challenge, or there was a question mark if it was worth putting those into a road-legal car. But at the end, everything came alive and the result is more or less everything we asked for.” 

Fittingly, perhaps, given Fernando’s importance to Aston, this isn’t his only company car: by the time you read this, he’ll have taken delivery of a Valkyrie in the F1 team’s colours. As to that rather more pestilential element of having a company car – tax – we’ll just
have to assume he has people taking care of that… 

The Valour - and Alonso himself - were big crowd pulls at the Goodwood Festival of Speed

Photo by: Aston Martin