Reviving the Valkyrie LMH programme
It’s not been an easy road to get here. The Valkyrie was always intended to get a spot on endurance grids, with Aston announcing plans to race it as far back as 2019. But with the changing of the guard at Aston and a big move into F1 as a constructor, the whole plan was put on ice.
The marque has since then and up to this point been relatively noncommittal on its intentions with the WEC, and it’s taken partnering with a customer team in Heart of Racing to make the project’s revival tenable.
The marque has since then and up to this point been relatively noncommittal on its intentions with the WEC and indeed, it’s taken partnering with a customer team in Heart of Racing, to make the project’s revival tenable. All that being said, the claim is that the idea was never fully dead, with Heart of Racing and Aston Martin staying in touch on the subject since the team’s founding in 2020.
Stroll summed up Aston’s approach to the revival of the programme pretty succinctly. “We have an incredible hypercar and the world deserves to see it race. We’re doing it because it’s there.”
Incidentally, the Valkyrie Hypercar will be the first Aston Martin factory racing effort not run by Prodrive – who did everything from the latest Vantages, to the Aston Martin Lola LMP1 car, to the DBR9 of the mid-2000s – for over 20 years.
“Our team has grown exponentially since we began racing with those famous wings at Daytona in 2020,” said Heart of Racing Team Principal, Ian James.
“We understand and are aligned with the ethos of the brand and we have developed our own systems and technologies to extract the maximum performance of the cars we compete with. Our understanding of Valkyrie is strong and we have worked closely with it through our customer activation programmes for two years now.