Yahoo News Aston Martin Valiant Is an Auric Revival of '80s Brutalism
The 2025 Aston Martin Valiant is the race-inspired version of the stunning limited-edition Valour.
The Valiant has a full carbon-fiber body, a six-speed manual, and a 734-hp twin-turbo 5.3-liter V-12.
First customer deliveries of the Valiant are slated to start at the end of the year, and production will be limited to 38 units globally.
The other day, at Aston Martin’s private “Q” customization lounge in Midtown Manhattan, we were granted the opportunity to preview the brand’s latest “Special.” In keeping with the venerable British marque’s v-based nomenclature, it is called the Valiant. Inspired in part by the wildly styled, wide-bodied, shovel-nosed “Muncher”–a track-based, forcedly inducted version of the brand’s DBS V-8 from the 1970s—this $2.5 million (to start) matte gold missile is a race-inspired iteration of the recent Valour.
The Valiant was initially created upon a request from Aston’s F1 driver Fernando Alonso, who after spending time with the Valour, told the team to create a car that would, according to Simon Newton, the brand’s head of vehicle dynamics, “Take out mass and make it more playful, more motorsport.”
The result shares some core features with the Valour. These include a full carbon-fiber body, a twin-turbo 5.3-liter V-12, and, delightfully, a six-speed manual transmission. But in this application, the 12-cylinder engine makes 734 horsepower—the highest-output manual/V-12 combo to appear in one of these limited-production Astons.
Visually, the car is more aggressive than the already domineering Valour. Most notable is the giant rear deck spoiler, which rises like an echt-wedgie St. Louis Arch from the razor box-flared rear fenders, and looks to have been propagated by mating the spoiler from a 1970 Plymouth Superbird with that from a 2010 Nissan GT-R.
“Anything this brutal is always going to raise an eyebrow from traditionalists in the brand,” says Alex Long, Aston’s head of product and market strategy. “We haven’t done pronounced wings and aero features like these in our classic DB series cars like the DB5 on up to the DB12. But we did have a more obtuse design phase in the late 1970s and 1980s, and that’s coming back in customer requests, because our commissioning clients are now people that grew up in that era. And this is changing what people are looking for in their collections.”
Other notable add-ons include a set of wind-cheating “fences” on the front lower splitter as well as in front of the rear wheels, graphic wheel covers, and a solid rear window louver that Newton calls “the armadillo.” This suite of distinctive windswept bits give the Valiant a cheeky tuner quality that pushes the boundaries for this dignified brand.
This is intentional, meant to shake up the brand’s perceived decorousness. “Aston has always been famous for beauty and design. But true top-in-class performance was never a reality,” says Long. “Now we are really pushing that boundary. We race in F1. Performance is a pillar now.”
In order to keep the car sticking to the tarmac without sacrificing all of Aston’s famed compliance, the Valiant also uses Multimatic adaptive spool-valve dampers. These suspenders are “very-precisely fine-tunable,” Newton says, “good for comfort, and ideal for controlling the wheel for tire contact,”
The goal of removing mass yielded a titanium exhaust, a magnesium torque tube and wheels, a 3-D printed rear subframe, and a lithium-ion motorsport battery. It also resulted in a pared-down interior with diminished sound-deadening material. The Valiant even sheds additional weight, or something, by using the archaic version of Mercedes’ infotainment that has been in Astons for the past decade, instead of the updated version that has recently rolled out across the company's lineup. All told, the car is nearly 250 pounds lighter than the Valour.
The Valiant will make its first public appearance at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, when Alonso himself will pilot the car up the estate’s famed hill climb. First customer deliveries are expected to occur at the end of 2024. Production will be limited to 38 units, globally, with about a dozen reserved for the North American market. Sadly, even if all of us at Car and Driver pool our collective net worth, we will still not be able to qualify for a purchase, as all 38 cars are already spoken for.
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