Aston Martin and Red Bull Racing unveil radical AM-RB 001 hypercar

Featured in:
September 2016

The product of a unique Innovation Partnership between the British luxury brand and eminent F1TM team, this ambitious, uncompromising and wholly extraordinary collaboration combines the vision and skills of two world-leading brands to create a road car the like of which has never been seen before.
The three men charged with realising this shared vision are Adrian Newey, Red Bull Racing’s chief technical officer and the world’s most successful F1TM designer, Marek Reichman, Aston Martin EVP and chief creative officer and David King, VP and chief special operations officer. Together they spearhead a formidable alliance. One that combines more than a 100 years of specialism – both with heritage, making some of the world’s most beautiful and charismatic GT cars, and with technological brilliance and relentless pursuit of speed and efficiency that has seen Red Bull Racing excel in the ferociously competitive world of Formula One.

Reichman and Newey are working closely on all aspects of the project, striving to ensure the AM-RB 001 is an unprecedented fusion of form and function: a car engineered to be entirely useable and enjoyable as a road car, but with the capability to perform like no road car before it on a race track. For those who crave an even more intensely focused driving experience, a track-only AM-RB 001 is also in development, the projected performance of which is in line with that of today’s LMP1 Le Mans sports prototypes.

Built around a lightweight carbon fibre structure, the AM-RB 001 boasts truly radical aerodynamics for unprecedented levels of downforce in a road-legal car. Thanks to the genius of Newey’s design much of this downforce is generated through underfloor aerodynamics, leaving Reichman free to craft a pure yet breathtaking dramatic form that elegantly expresses both the AM-RB 001’s cutting-edge dynamism and the unmistakable essence of Aston Martin.

Uncompromising in all respects, the AM-RB 001 is a bespoke machine from the tyres up. It will be built by David King and his team at Gaydon, in the purpose-built facility created for Aston Martin’s original hypercar, the One-77. More details of the AM-RB 001’s technical specification will be revealed in due course, but its heart is a new, mid-mounted, high-revving, naturally aspirated V12 engine with the potency to achieve a 1:1 power-to-weight ratio; 1 bhp per kilo of weight.

To cope with the extreme aerodynamic loadings at high speeds yet deliver the on-road usability and comfort levels that sit at the heart of the concept, the AM-RB 001’s suspension system will feature innovative technology and employ principles honed by Newey over his thirty-year career. Likewise, the transmission is a clean-sheet design conceived by Newey and developed by Red Bull Advanced Technologies.



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