Aston Martin and the Red Bull Racing Formula 1 team finally unveiled a model of the team's long-teased co-designed hypercar: The AM-RB 001.
For power, Aston is planning to use a naturally aspirated mid-mounted V12 of undisclosed size and output. Aston did say that the V12 will churn out “1 bhp per kilo of weight,” but forgot to mention how much the car actually weighs.
Transmission options are still up in the air, according to Autocar’s interview with Red Bull Racing’s chief technical officer Adrian Newey: “We don’t much like the current trends of double-clutch gearboxes; they weigh 150 kg and they’re very bulky, which doesn’t suit the concept.” There will be some sort of kinetic energy recovery system, though exactly how it will be deployed remains to be seen.
Despite not knowing exactly how much the car weighs, we do know it'll be on the lighter side given Aston Martin's liberal use of carbon fiber; apparently the material has been used for the car’s entire structure.
Considering the one horsepower per every kilogram of weight, we imagine the car will weigh less than 1000 kilograms, or 2,200 pounds making it one of the lightest hypercars on the road. And one of the lightest modern cars on the road, period.
With lots of power and little weight, Aston Martin had to get creative with the aero package; this is where Newey's F1-winning expertise came into play.
The car uses front and rear diffusers to guide air underneath the body, plus a relatively small, adaptable rear spoiler. To compete with the likes of the LaFerrari , Porsche 918 Spyder and McLaren P1 , there had better be some aerodynamic wizardry at play here.
Both road and track versions of the AM-RB 001 will be built; Aston Martin plans on testing one next year, with sale versions arriving in 2018. The long wait for testing makes sense, considering the team working on the car has yet to figure out the car’s essentials.
Like other hypercars, there won’t be a lot of these to go around only 99 to 150 are planned for production. The 150 unit production cap includes the 25 race-only versions and the rest of the prototypes. With the limited number of cars, the roughly $3 million dollar price tag mentioned by Autocar does seem reasonable.
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