Aston boss: “the Valhalla will help us reposition Aston Martin again”

“The Valhalla will help us reposition Aston Martin again,” new boss Adrian Hallmark said earlier this year. Here it is, repositioned from a handsome set of images rendered digitally on your screen, to an even more handsome set of images taken from the so-called ‘real world’.

And doesn’t it look splendid. It’s the first mid-engined Aston Martin supercar ever built, boasting a hugely complex and brand-new architecture that’s likely giving the McLaren W1 and Ferrari F80 nightmares. This one’s available for a fraction of those hyperbeasts’ prices, but more on that later.

There’s a bespoke 4.0-litre twin turbo flat-plane crank V8 at the Valhalla’s dark heart; an engine derived very loosely from the one in the Mercedes-AMG GT. Here it kicks out 817bhp.

That’s not all, because three electric motors join the party – two on the front axle, one in the gearbox – for a headline total of 1,065bhp and 811lb ft. It’s fast alright – 0-62mph in 2.5s and a top speed of 217mph – but more than that, it should be… electric to drive. Not literally, of course. We refer you back to the whole ‘flat-plane-crank V8’ thing.

Three-time Le Mans class winner and Aston development driver Darren Turner is currently enjoying said V8, as Aston is performing its final validation checks across road and track: Spain for the track stuff to check out the steering and active aero, and the UK to make sure our road network doesn’t crush the Valhalla’s expensive dampers.

And speaking of expensive, each one will start from around £850k, which is a bit of a bargain when – according to Hallmark – it sits somewhere between ‘a regular supercar and a hypercar’.

“The product portfolio [at Aston Martin] is the best we’ve had,” Hallmark said about the current and burgeoning line-up. “We’ve got a pure sports car, a great grand tourer, a benchmark V12 product, and probably the most technically advanced hypercar on the road in the form of Valkyrie.

“And soon to be the most affordable supercar with a mid-engine compared to an F80 or W1,” he added. “I guess if we’d known that they were coming at those prices seven years ago, [the Valhalla] wouldn’t be £850,000 today. But watch this space – it should be good for residual values.”

And do watch this space: Hallmark has already confirmed there’ll be special editions spun off the Valhalla’s base, not least because a) there’s tonnes of potential in it, and b) it’s super expensive to engineer something so complex so frequently.

“We’re going to slow it down a bit and get boring. We’re going to use Vanquish and Valhalla as the basis to do a couple of specials,” Hallmark said. “And only those, and do them in the right time according to a credible development period and get them sold before we even declare them.”

Speaking of sold, Aston's only building 999 Valhallas, and we're informed around two-thirds of those have already been allocated. Looks like you might have to be quick if you want to snap up this handsome, now-very-real super-hyper-car.