2026 Aston Martin Valhalla review: International first drive

Flooring the throttle in an Aston Martin Valhalla is something you’re going to want to work up to. It’s not the work of a moment.

It’s also not like a fast electric car, where you're jolted back into your seat in silence. This is something in another realm of violence and, yes, consequence.

The first time you do acquire the resolve to pin it, the cabin fills with the bellow of its AMG-derived 4.0-litre V8, the vibrations through the bulkhead behind you making it feel as if the engine’s about to unshackle itself and bust through.

The tacho needle rockets to the 7000rpm redline, and you flick the paddles to grab another gear with a thump, the turbos briefly fluttering. The scenery explodes through the slot-like windscreen, and the numbers on the speedo show no signs of relenting. It’s both terrifying and addictive.

Fortunately, we’ve got a race circuit upon which to extend the Valhalla, but we’re also driving it on-road, so we ought to be able to bring you a properly rounded verdict on a car that is the biggest technological step-change in Aston Martin's 113-year history.

First, let’s get some of the fundamentals squared away. We’ll begin with the backstory. Context is important here.

The progenitor of the Valhalla we see here was first unveiled at the 2019 Geneva motor show. The AM-RB (yep, Red Bull) 003 was a slinky showstopper that owed more to the extreme Valkyrie in its form factor and design language, part of then-CEO Andy Palmer’s desire for the company to return to building mid-engined supercars.

Perhaps return is a bit of a stretch, as the last one, the 1980 Aston Martin Bulldog, never actually reached production. Nevertheless, it afforded Aston some sort of historical narrative to lean on. But, as is well documented, Aston's history since has been turbulent.

The chief exec’s office has latterly been more like an AFL interchange bench. Palmer’s vision for the AM-RB 003, with its V6 engine and 1000hp power target, departed the building with him in May 2020.

In came ex-AMG man Tobias Moers, who somewhat predictably decreed that the car needed a V8 and an AMG-sourced one at that. In effect, it's a version of the M178.980 engine out of the old Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series.

In that guise, it made 537kW. Here, the internal combustion engine element contributes 609kW to the Valhalla's total output, thanks to bigger turbos, a new inlet manifold, reinforced pistons, new camshafts and a host of other detailed changes.

It also meant that the wheelbase needed to be teased out to accommodate the longer engine, and the styling direction changed again. Less extreme, but still extroverted.

Moers wasn’t a man likely to trouble the diplomatic corps and, having ruffled more than a few feathers in the C-suite, was replaced in May 2022 by the former Ferrari CEO, Amedeo Felisa, who in turn made way in March 2024 for ex-Bentley boss Adrian Hallmark. 

So, given that roster of strong personalities, it’s understandable that each would want their own imprimatur on the car and that it might seem a little less than cohesive as a result.

That said, Moers undoubtedly had the biggest impact on this production-ready version. 

He not only insisted on the V8, but also steered the project towards its current architecture, with the petrol engine driving the rear wheels, a pair of electric motors up front, and another sitting within the Graziano-developed eight-speed dual-clutch transmission.

Power? A healthy 1079PS, or 1064bhp, or 794kW. Plenty in whichever denomination you prefer.

Helped by all-wheel drive, it’ll batter its way to 100km/h in just 2.5 seconds and keep going to 350km/h. But straight-line speed has become such a devalued commodity that these numbers no longer have the capacity to shock. Fortunately, the Valhalla has other weapons to call upon.

It’s a bigger slab of a car than it looks on paper, fully 4727mm long and 2208mm wide. Despite the complexity of the engineering beneath, the carbon-fibre chassis and bodywork help keep kerb weight down to a reasonable 1655kg (tare).

Before driving it, I wondered whether the Valhalla was a Ferrari 849 Testarossa rival at twice the price, or was more hypercar Ferrari F80-adjacent at a third of the price. Having spent some time with it, the answer is definitely the latter. So it’s a bargain? Sort of.

The list price is currently set at £850,000 in the UK. Convert that to Australian dollars, add Luxury Car Tax and that’s almost $2,000,000 before you’ve even considered stamp duty. Factor in a typical 20 per cent options spend and you're creeping up to around $2.5m drive-away. In other words, you're going to need some pretty deep pockets for what is one of the most expensive production cars on sale in Australia.

Still, that looks strong value compared to the $7 million-plus you’d need to pay to get your hands on a Ferrari F80; a price tag that apparently blindsided the team at Gaydon. But make no mistake, the Valhalla is right there or thereabouts in terms of ability.

Just 999 units will be built, but unlike the F80, it’s being built for right-hand-drive markets too, as indeed it should be, given its British heritage. A number have already been earmarked for Australian customers, with Aston scheduling a customer launch event later in the year at Sydney Motorsport Park.

Our introduction to the Valhalla began with a road drive. To get in, you need to stretch and locate a dinky microswitch under the lower intake. You need to be pretty spry to fold yourself into the carbon seat, but once you’re in, it doesn’t feel notably pinched for space – and I'm not short.

The choice to fit inboard pushrod front dampers means the cowl height is super low. Look out across the car and you can see the front tyres through openings in the bodywork. As a consequence of the low windscreen, the roof is mounted fairly low as well, which means taller drivers have a slightly compromised eye level.

In effect, you’re peering through a slot of glass between the top of the carbon-fibre steering wheel and the big rear-view mirror. The latter is a camera image, although you can switch it to a conventional mirror if you prefer. However, there’s zero rear view out of the cabin, so there is that.

There are a couple of screens inside the car that might disappoint those looking for a more traditional Aston Martin dial pack. I can understand that sentiment, but the screens are a practical solution. Both wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are supported, and shoehorned somewhere into the Valhalla is a 14-speaker Bowers & Wilkins surround-sound system that can crank a chunky 745W output.

The seat frame can be manually bolted into one of three heights. I was on the middle setting, but I’d prefer it such that your fundament is skimming the bitumen. Even as it is, you’re aware that your rear is lower than your feet. With the seat as far back on its runners as it'll go, it twitters and squeals against the bulkhead like the queue outside a Taylor Swift concert.

It’s not quite the ‘sitting in the bath with your feet on the taps’ that F1 drivers experience, but it’s agreeably racy. The other reason for this position is a little more prosaic: Aston needed to find a dry place to package a lot of the electronic controllers up front, so under your heels they went.

Apart from a slot in the centre console and a small tray of questionable utility beneath, there is zero luggage space. Like, nothing. No boot, no frunk, not even a cubby behind the seats. Still, if you’re in this earnings bracket, you can probably order a DBX as a complementary tender vehicle and pay a driver to arrive at your dropped pin.

Go time. Prod the starter and the engine whirs into life and settles with a busy rumble. There's no great beauty to the sound, but its purposeful and eager. You don’t need ear defenders like a Valkyrie, but you always know it’s there. That’s unless you click the drive selector into EV mode, whereupon you can drive a fully-charged Valhalla about 14km on electricity alone. Yep, it’s a plug-in hybrid with a 6.1kWh battery pack on board.

On the road, you’re likely going to be in the parallel-hybrid Sport mode most of the time. On sportier sections, rotating the dial switches you to Sport+, which keeps the engine running continuously. 

This is also the mode in which the Valhalla is the quickest, because it provides full-system outputs on demand. The logic there is that you're never going to be at full throttle for long on public roads, so it can afford to drain the battery a bit. It's the mode you need to use if you're trying to extract the fastest figures against the clock.

In Race mode, the car is a tiny bit slower, as it strives to retain residual battery charge so that it doesn’t go into a de-rating mode on-track where it has no electrical boost. Tortoise and hare, if you like. That all seems very topical right now.

With a power-to-weight figure of 480kW/tonne, the Valhalla is slightly down on the 579kW/tonne of the Ferrari F80, but way in excess of the 397kW/tonne of the Lamborghini Revuelto. A Bugatti Veyron, still most people's yardstick for cars in this circa 1000hp bracket, comes in at 370kW/tonne.

The hypercar 'holy trinity'? Well, a LaFerrari bowls up 447kW/tonne, a McLaren P1 is good for 452kW/tonne and the Porsche 918 Spyder is some way in the rear-view at 379kW/tonne. Perhaps now you can appreciate just how potent the Valhalla is.

The steering is quite weighty and that map doesn’t alter very much across the drive modes. The wheel itself is a little cramped if you have large hands, as the position of the grips and the paddles makes hand placement quite prescriptive. It’s also possible to accidentally press some of the buttons on the wheel as you wrap your mitts around the rim.

The brake-by-wire system also requires a bit of pedal effort, but the massive carbon-ceramic brakes (410mm up front and 390mm at the rear) deliver concussive stopping power, helped by a hefty tyre footprint.

On the subject of rubberwear, the cars supplied on the launch for the road route were shod with Michelin Pilot Sport 5S tyres, while the cars reserved for the track activity wore the other tyre option, the Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2. Sizes? 285/30 ZR20 up front and 335/30 ZR21 at the back.

You could quite reasonably expect a low-slung hypercar riding on liquorice-strap tyres to deliver the sort of comportment akin to a bad night on the Spirit of Tassie, but the Valhalla has a wonderful trick up its sleeve.

On their own, the adaptive Bilstein ATX dampers, which are assisted by a super-stiff carbon tub, would certainly help improve ride comfort. But that’s not the really clever thing.

Counterintuitively for a car that’s draped in both front and rear active aero devices, the Valhalla doesn’t chase a massive peak downforce figure.

Instead of making its peak downforce at its top speed of 350km/h and then requiring enormously stiff springs to support that, the Valhalla instead delivers its maximum 610kg of downforce at 250km/h.

At higher speeds, it progressively bleeds off downforce with its active aero, maintaining that 610kg figure. This means that the springs aren’t massively over-specified for normal road speeds.

As a result, the Valhalla delivers a malleable ride on-road that won’t have you wincing at the thought of your chiropractor’s bill when you spot an incoming expansion joint on the road. It breathes with the road surface in the classic Aston Martin tradition. I wasn’t expecting that.

You also get a standard nose lift system for when you need to negotiate a drop kerb or parking ramp, but the ride height isn’t so surface-skimming that you’ll need it in everyday conditions.

Of course, with the small matter of 794kW at your disposal, you’d expect it to be searingly rapid. If anything, it’s even quicker than you’ve girded yourself for, largely because of that low-end torque fill generated by the e-motors.

Why did Aston Martin choose to fit three? The front two are easy enough to justify. They provide a reversing function (as the Graziano 'box has no dedicated reverse gear) and front-wheel-drive all-electric running, and yes, I did ask chief engineer Andrew Kay how fast the Valhalla could drive in reverse.

He claimed it was theoretically capable of 140km/h in reverse, but envisaging the disaster that this could potentially entail, sensibly limited the electric reverse to a 30km/h top speed.

The key benefits of the two front motors to performance driving are additional traction and cross-axle torque vectoring.

There’s a massive 1500Nm of differential torque vectoring across that front axle. Aston Martin claims that the car could, in theory at least, direct 750Nm of forward torque to one front wheel and 750Nm of reverse torque at the other front wheel.

In practice, it can react and deploy power more quickly and capably than a garden-variety torque-vectoring-by-braking setup. Upon turn-in, it's used to control yaw rate (rotation), amplifying the Valhalla's naturally reactive, mid-engined feel.

It's also linked to the brake pedal, which is ideal for drivers who like to left-foot trail-brake deep into the apex of a corner, the yaw rate modulated to the brake pedal demand.

The torque-vectoring system then transitions from a lateral contribution to a longitudinal one on corner exits, delivering enormous traction.

In other words, what many rivals do with stability control via braking, a retarding force, the Valhalla is doing with additive torque vectoring and traction management. The results are devastating.

And there are more curiosities too. The P2.5 e-motor buried in the gearbox works on the even-numbered gears, so while the vehicle is in, say, third gear, the massive torque of this motor is driving either second or fourth. That’s right, the Valhalla can be in two forward gears at any one time. It’s absolutely brain-bending.

Imagine trying to calibrate all of these systems: the hydraulic e-diff, the drive motors, the stability control, the torque vectoring, the adaptive damping, the drive modes and the transmission logic in concert with one another. It’s been a mammoth task, but this is one area of the car that is quite dumbfoundingly good.

It’s borderline genius. It had absolutely no right to come together like this given the car’s turbulent genesis.

In almost every decision that underpinned the finessing of these systems, the engineering team strove to make them invisible. Let’s pause for a moment here and think of the restraint that this requires.

It’s part of human nature to want to show off a bit if you’ve created something very clever, to make it perform a ‘look at me’ party trick that’s overtly different to what we’ve seen before. Aston Martin resisted that urge, rejecting anything that felt synthetic.

Instead, the company aimed at fusing all of these diverse systems to a very specific end, and that was to deliver an organic feel to the drive. So you don’t get wacky steering maps, juvenile drift settings or hundreds of drive-mode options that just leave you in a perpetual fug of FOMO.

Instead, you end up with a vehicle with over a thousand horsepower that, if you’ve got enough space to exploit it, feels as playful as a Toyota GR86. This is one for the drivers.

Luckily we’ve got the Navarra circuit in northern Spain to unleash the Valhalla on. It’s a technical track of 17 corners, some odd sightlines, an 800m front straight and plenty of places where you could conceive of punching a Valhalla-shaped hole in the local scenery.

Since you’re still here, can I break the fourth wall a bit and let you in on how these events are usually run? 

We tend to get a handful of laps sitting in a convoy behind a lead driver who’ll run round at a reasonable pace, divesting the slowest drivers off the back who’ll arrive white-knuckled at the pits because they had no idea where the track went, while those more talented drivers at the front will wish the lead driver would have gone quicker.

Aston Martin offered some of their race drivers to show us the racing lines and then let us have at it. That was it. And you’ll only do that if you’re incredibly confident in your product’s durability, its behaviour at the limits of grip and maybe the participants too.

If you wanted to turn the stability control off and smear big drifts around the hairpins you could. If you wanted to scribe a clean lap at maximum attack, you could. The Valhalla was happy to do both. The nine-stage traction-control system is easy and intuitive to operate, unlike some of its rivals.

Once you’d got the track’s quirks mentally mapped, going faster allowed the Valhalla to display more of what it was capable of. Flick it into Race and you can feel the effects of that downforce. You can see the airbrake pop up to its 51.5-degree angle and fill the rear-view monitor. 

You can spot it drop to its -8.5-degree drag reduction setting along the straights. That’s right, it moves past the horizontal plane to conform to the downward-flowing air that streams over the roof of the car. 

There’s more active aero under the front end. It’s almost like an F1 car’s front wing structure up front, with multiple elements that can rotate at up to 45 degrees, turning vanes and outboard elements. 

The front end is mighty, with great stability under braking thanks to the e-diff and a really reassuring response on turn-in. Again and again, I was turning into corners at what I estimated might be close to the level of front-end grip, but the Valhalla had more to give. Diving confidently into that part of the downforce envelope probably requires a little more familiarity. 

Traction out of corners, thanks to the Valhalla’s arsenal of weaponry, is probably more impressive than any road-legal vehicle this side of a McMurtry Spéirling. Power oversteer is there if you really provoke it, but more often than not it just grips and goes.

The Valhalla communicates the limits of grip cleanly too, both through the steering and via the seat of your pants. It’s not one of those cars that delivers a glassy moment when it exceeds the adhesion of the tyre patches. It feels onside and, dare I say it, friendly.

It’s helped by massive rear lateral stiffness at the tyre contact patch. It’s 70 per cent stiffer than the next-best car in Aston Martin’s portfolio, the Vantage, with its solidly mounted rear subframe. And it’s around 25 per cent stiffer than most key competitors.

There’s a maxim among chassis engineers that if you think there’s an issue with the rear, it’s the front, and vice versa. Therefore, having this utterly implacable lateral stiffness at the back allows the chassis team more leeway at the front, knowing that you can take a few liberties with the torque vectoring, but not so much that it feels like you’re driving a simulator.

It's a great report card for the chassis team.

The engine never delivers the sort of crescendo you might expect from a flat-plane V8, with all of its work done and dusted by 7000rpm, and there’s not a huge aural reward for revving it out to that point. It’s almost as if volume just increases. Those who love a spine-tingling soundtrack might be disappointed here.

But what the Valhalla lacks at the top end, it more than compensates with in terms of low-end tractability. While some hypercars wait to get into their stride in the upper reaches of the rev range, the Aston will have just disappeared. 

The advantage of this is that you can plug into the meat of the torque curve almost all of the time. The Valhalla’s not big on delayed gratification. The engine makes its peak torque of 868Nm right up at 6700rpm, but at just 2500rpm it’s generating more than 800Nm. Add the electric assistance, and it amps up to 1100Nm. That’s crazy.

Let’s have a walk around the car and just touch on some of the more interesting elements.

The exhaust system that you see angled up at the back of the car, well, that’s the quiet exhaust designed to pass drive-by noise tests. There’s also another exhaust system mounted low at the back that is a good deal more vocal and takes over high-speed duties.

The top-mounted exhausts suffered a bit of an issue, though. As you built speed, the heat of the gases being emitted was tending to cremate the paint on the rear panel. To fix this, Aston Martin came up with an elegant solution.

Some of the air being taken into the engine’s airbox from the roof-mounted ‘snorkel’ is scavenged and re-routed to create a cold-air blanket that insulates the rear painted panel from above and below. And Aston Martin even engineered a little gurney into the trailing edge of the exhaust cowling to flick gases upwards. It’s lovely stuff.

Then there’s the fabrication of the carbon chassis itself, handled by Aston Martin Performance Technologies, the crew who engineer the F1 cars in Silverstone. This is built in two parts, upper and lower, the former weighing just 74kg and fabricated using a high-consistency resin transfer moulding technique.

The upper section is the more traditional hand-laid carbon fibre, cured as a separate part and then bonded to the tub. More carbon is then laid over the joint and the whole structure is then cured again in an autoclave. The cabin features a riot of chopped carbon-fibre finishes.

As well as a dizzying amount of colour and trim choices, and some very special options delivered by Q by Aston Martin, the bespoke division, customers also get to choose between the standard aluminium wheel set or the lightweight magnesium option.

The magnesium wheels save around 12kg of unsprung weight, and although they’re very expensive, the take-up rate is around 90 per cent. After all, who wants the pov-pack Valhalla?

The multi-element headlights are the part of the car that requires the longest manufacturing lead time, and I can believe that, looking at their sheer intricacy. They borrow the gold elements from the Valkyrie that would work beautifully with some hue of green paintwork.

On both flanks are long, tapered carbon panels that lift to reveal ancillaries like the filler points for fluids, the 12V battery, the charging socket and so on. Aston Martin did consider making a high-concept filler cap, but instead opted to bury it out of sight on the right-hand side.

Whereas the original AM RB-003 concept had a flush front end, the production Valhalla now features a more conventional Aston Martin grille, behind which is a trio of radiators. Low down on the flanks are an intake that feeds the oil coolers, the transmission on one side, and the engine on the other. Air is directed into these by the turning vanes aft of the front wheels.

The snorkel on the roof looks after almost everything that the 609kW internal combustion engine needs. Most of its air goes to two huge air-to-air charge coolers that are mounted directly above the engine.

Look closely and there’s a little gap between these charge coolers directly above the turbo chambers. The turbos are mounted inside the vee of the V8 engine: the so-called ‘hot-vee’ configuration.

Although this brings packaging benefits, it also raises issues when it comes to cooling. So there’s a central duct in the snorkel that fires air straight at each 8kg turbocharger. That air is then used to draw heat through the exhaust system.

Looking at the exterior, many of the painted surfaces have been protected to create a sleek design, while the darker elements are functional, including the air intakes and moveable aero parts.

The little vortex generators mounted low ahead of the rear wheels were apparently a personal request from Aston chairman Lawrence Stroll, who wanted a more overt visual link to Aston’s F1 technology. They're functional too, adding up to 10kg of downforce per side.

I think the Valhalla looks brilliant: blending aggression and elegance while still somehow managing to carry off front-to-rear cohesion. It’s a versatile shape too, lending itself to both conservative colour schemes and some very extrovert liveries.

Aston Martin already claims that some 55 per cent of Valhalla orders are coming from buyers who are new to the marque. That is excellent news for a company that’s navigating some choppy financials at present.

Bringing in new blood to the brand will doubtless generate consequent orders for the likes of the DBX SUV or the DB12, Vantage and Vanquish coupes.

It seems a particularly badly kept secret that an open-topped version of the Valhalla is in the works, and there’s clearly scope for an even more aggressively-focused track version, possibly bearing the Valhalla S badge. That'd be the one to post the eye-catching Nürburgring lap time.

I didn’t expect the Valhalla to feel anything like so dynamically polished. It’s a brilliant driver’s car in a market where most of its rivals live out their lives as urban show ponies.

Aston Martin should be congratulated in being so bold with this car. It’s the first car that the brand has ever offered with a dual-clutch transmission, the first plug-in hybrid, the first with three electric motors, the first with a flat-plane crank and so on. 

It could so easily have resulted in hubristic over-reach. Instead it’s created a car that’ll have your face hurting from laughing out loud.

Finding 999 owners at this price may not be the work of a moment. Some 152 vehicles were delivered in 2025, with 500 scheduled to be built this year. That leaves, by my maths, 347 for 2027.

Given that there is likely to be an open-topped version, that build total may well rise. Ferrari capped F80 production at 799 units, which many customers felt was too much to guarantee the exclusivity they demanded.

Indeed, this might prove the Valhalla’s Achilles heel. Most people who are savvy enough to find themselves in the position to spend $2.5m on a car are smart enough to recognise whether said car will prove a canny investment. In that regard at least, the jury still seems to be out on Aston’s masterpiece.

What’s not up for debate is that the Valhalla looks jaw-dropping, drives brilliantly, and will exceed expectations in virtually every regard. Aston Martin should be congratulated for taking on so much and delivering so spectacularly. 

It took a while. It’s been worth the wait.

Andy brings almost 30 years automotive writing experience to his role at Drive. When he wasn’t showing people which way the Nürburgring went, he freelanced for outlets such as Car, Autocar, and The Times. After contributing to Top Gear Australia, Andy subsequently moved Down Under, serving as editor at MOTOR and Wheels. As Drive’s Road Test Editor, he’s at the heart of our vehicle testing, but also loves to spin a long-form yarn.

Read more about Andy Enright