Why the stars have aligned to bring Aston Martin back to the top class at Le Mans

It may seem strange that a programme revealed way back in the summer of 2019 is finally going to make it into competition in 2025. Three years after Aston Martin pushed its Valkyrie Le Mans Hypercar onto the back-burner, the gas has been whacked back up to 11. Yet it’s perhaps not so strange when you understand how the stars have aligned to make this the right time for it to revitalise a project that will take it back to the Le Mans 24 Hours in pursuit of a repeat of its 1959 victory with the DBR1.

Aston Martin's intent to bid for outright honours at Le Mans as part of a World Endurance Championship campaign with the Adrian Newey-inspired Valkyrie was announced on the eve of the French enduro four years ago. It was put on hold - the term used by the marque - seven months later in February 2020. But development of the car didn’t really stop.

The car designed to go to Le Mans effectively ended up becoming what Aston bills as the ultimate track-day car, the Valkyrie AMR Pro. Or at least the basis for a 1000kg, 1000bhp tool that boasts LMP1 levels of performance. That explains part of Aston boss Lawrence Stroll’s explanation when asked the ‘why now’ question at Wednesday’s launch. “Because we have this incredible Hypercar,” was his opening gambit.

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Any number of drivers who have sampled the AMR Pro have offered a similar sentiment about the car. “You know what?” they’ve mused. “It wouldn’t take much to turn this into a racing car.” What they should have said was “turn it back into a racing car”.

The very reason that the original Valkyrie design, the work of Multimatic Motorsports over the second half of 2019, didn’t end up as race car is inextricably linked to why the AMR Pro is being turned back into one today.

The first iteration of the LMH was shelved in the wake of the announcement of the LMDh category at the 2020 Daytona 24 Hours IMSA SportsCar Championship curtain-raiser. Aston argued that the cheaper entry into the WEC allowed by the LMP2-based category had undermined the business case for the Valkyrie LMH. It needed to sell cars to customer teams and collectors to make the project work financially. At a time when it was, we believe, already struggling to attract orders, it decided to mothball the LMH.

Aston Martin's Valkyrie programme was revealed back in 2019 originally, before the onset of LMDh prompted a rethink

Photo by: Aston Martin

But the LMDh announcement, the key moment in the convergence process that allows the same cars to race on both the world stage in WEC and in IMSA in North America, is the very reason why we are now banging on about a golden era of sportscar racing. It is why we will have nine major car makers racing in one or other or both series next year, and 10 from 2025 on Aston’s arrival.

This landscape is what has attracted Aston back to race in both arenas with the US-based Heart of Racing team. It is one that didn’t exist in the early months of 2020. For all the euphoria of that day at Daytona, predictions of the golden era remained just that. Predictions. The world would inevitably have to wait for firm commitments from major manufacturers.

Ferrari, of course, didn’t decide to build an LMDh, but the fact that it decided to give the green light to an LMH project had a lot to do with the environment it created. It very much wanted to be part of something big when it confirmed its participation in February 2021, just as Aston does today.

Let’s not forget either that when LMDh was announced, the intention was that the cars would begin racing in 2022 rather than this year. The original target was optimistic in the first place and became an impossibility once COVID hit in the months after Daytona 2020.

“With this programme we will see our sportscar racing thoroughbred bloodline coming out in new product lines and people will see that Aston Martin is a sportscar racing company” Adam Carter

The whole convergence process was about much more than that single day at Daytona. There was a lot of hard work in the background that took the better part of 18 months to ensure that there could be a level playing field between LMH and LMDh machinery. Until that work was done, IMSA didn’t finally sign off the participation of LMHs in its series.

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Aston wants and needs to race against the the same manufacturers with which it competes for road car sales. That’s the likes of Porsche, Ferrari and Lamborghini. They didn’t confirm their participation until December 2020, February 2021 and May 2022 respectively. Put simply, it took a long time for the case for Aston to return to the pinnacle of sportscar racing to become a compelling one.

“At Le Mans and in the WEC and IMSA there is formidable competition, but also the right competition for Aston Martin,” say Adam Carter, the new head of endurance motorsport at the company. “The competition is the same competition that we face in the marketplace, so it is right for us to be involved.”

Lawrence Stroll's takeover of Aston Martin has led to a renewed impetus on racing activities

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

The early part of 2020 was also a time for change of Aston Martin. Stroll led the consortium that took over the marque. He, of course, took the Aston name back into F1 when he rebranded his Racing Point team, but he also has clear a vision for the company. He wants racing to be at the very heart of its culture and to feed know-how into its future road cars.

“I focused a lot more attention into the performance part of Aston Martin when I took over, hence the focus on the F1 team, hence the focus on this,” said Stroll at the launch. “The DNA has always been racing, has been in the blood of Aston Martin and I wanted to carry that tradition louder, harder and faster.”

To that effect, he set up Aston Martin Performance Technologies in 2021, which over time will be fully based on the same AMR Technology Campus opened in the summer as the F1 team. It is from AMPT that the Valkyrie LMH project is being masterminded under Carter’s remit.

“With this programme we will see our sportscar racing thoroughbred bloodline coming out in new product lines and people will see that Aston Martin is a sportscar racing company,” he says. “Part of AMPTs role is to be a portal and a facilitator to get that true motor racing engineering directly linked back into our road cars.”

Aston made much last month of how the F1 team has played a role in the development of the new-for-2024 mid-engined Valhalla. That development has been accelerated by F1 methodologies, experience and technologies in several key areas, vehicle dynamics, aerodynamics and materials.

Carter stresses that it was important to has all the correct building blocks in place for such programme as big as one conceived with the ambition of winning Le Mans, and the establishment of AMPT was one of them.

“You’ve got to establish the programme on the right foundations,” he explains. “That doesn’t happen overnight. It is not an easy thing to do to go and be competitive in what is being called a golden era of sportscar racing.”

Aston's Valkyrie project is set to be based on the same campus as its F1 team

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Aston also needed a partner, one that is making a financial contribution to get the Valkyrie on track. As a small, niche even, manufacturer it needs to be a little more creative that mighty companies such as Toyota or Porsche. It is also worth pointing out here that Ferrari has pre-sold its first run of 499Ps to collectors, which can be presumed to be an essential part of the business model behind its return to the top flight of sportscar racing.

That partner is Heart of Racing, which was established by computer games tycoon Gabe Newell - co-founder of Valve Software - ahead of the 2020 season. Exactly who is paying for what is obviously not in the public domain, but it needs to be said that the Valkyrie programme isn’t chequebook racing as far as Aston Martin is concerned.

Aston did have multiple suitors, “other people who put their hands up”, says Carter, but a team in Heart of Racing that has been running Astons in IMSA since 2020 and in the WEC since early this year quickly came into the picture. It appears to have been the leading candidate pretty much as AMPT began evaluating getting the Valkyrie LMH on track around March time this year.

Carter says that having the right partners was key, but it was only one of the reasons the Valkyrie race programme has finally been unlocked.

Heart of Racing will run the Valkyrie programme, having successfully been the marque's GT partner in sportscars

Photo by: Geoffrey M. Miller / Motorsport Images