ATHLETIC, FUN-LOVING, GSOH

And for Aston Martin's next trick? Nailing its late, very ambitious mid-engined hybrid hypercar

-  Ben Miller

THERE IS A RISK WHEN contemplating cars like this Aston and its 1,000-plus-hp peers (exempli gratia Ferrari's SF90 XX, Lamborghini's more affordable V12 Revuelto) of writing them off as too much: too much money, too much power, too much stuff (all three use an engine, a battery, and three e-motors).

A Mazda MX-5 is all you need, right, or a 1960s Elan? Lightweight, honest, chuckable... That, a vocal majority will tell you, is real driving.

But what if you could have everything that the Valhalla brings (the carbon tub and arse-on-the-deck theatre of a Le Mans prototype, endless performance, a fluency with speed that swells confidence and urges experimentation) together with the chuckability of an Elan or an MX-5? What if you could have a car that is as intuitive to mess about with mid-corner as the aforementioned Lotus or Mazda, its limits telegraphed with crystal clarity as you play with slip angle (the only limits are the multistage stability control and your brain's ability to cope with sustained hedonism), but that can also accelerate with the kind of serene, sustained violence no MX-5 or Elan ever managed? In short, what if Aston Martin built a V8 tri-motor monster of a hybrid hypercar that was not a monster at all?

That car is the Valhalla, a prototype of which we are driving on the Silverstone Stowe circuit six months ahead of its official launch. Rest assured it is nothing like the car you think it is. After the oddball, halo Valkyrie (that is the Adrian Newey one, with the Cosworth V12, the wild aero and the cockpit like a gerbil's womb), the Valhalla looked initially like a very Aston Martin sequel to that Red Bull collaboration; heavier, softer, more woolly. The Valhalla also looked big in Aston's initial images and the talk, oddly, was of a road focus and accessible performance. With north of 1,000 hp and an F1 team (kind of) doing your marketing? Weird.