Valkyrie’s debut in the 24 Hour of Le Mans is a key milestone both in the development of the car and the sporting history of the brand, said Aston Martin CEO Adrian Hallmark. Le Mans is the pinnacle of endurance motorsport and, perhaps, the most famous standalone race on Earth. It is only right that the Hypercar class of the field contains an Aston Martin, and one that galvanizes the legions of fans who come to watch this wonderful race as well as the millions more who follow it from around the world.

The sport’s fans have waited a long time to hear the Valkyrie’s V12 engine echo through the trees along the famous Mulsanne Straight, and Aston Martin is proud to bring this evocative soundtrack back to its natural habitat. Along with our outstanding partner, The Heart of Racing, we will do our utmost to ensure Valkyrie delivers on its promise with a performance worthy of all the work that has gone into the programme thus far.

The livery, which features a Union Flag flying along the side of the engine cover fin, is a tribute to the great British racing heritage at Le Mans and forms part of Aston Martin’s wider celebrations on its return to the top class of the great race this year. Aston Martin also announced this week that it will build a limited run of a non-homologated version of the Valkyrie racer, designated Valkyrie LM, along with a fully immersive driver-development programme that will provide the ultimate present-day top-class endurance motorsport experience to the hands of an exclusive number of customers.

Masterminded by works team The Heart of Racing (THOR), the two Aston Martin THOR Team Valkyries are the first factory Aston Martin ‘Le Mans Hypercars’ (LMH) to compete in the top class (Hypercar) of the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) – which includes the blue riband 24 Hours of Le Mans – since the series was founded in 2012.

Valkyrie once again positions Aston Martin – one of endurance racing’s oldest competitors and one of WEC’s most successful manufacturers with 11 championship titles – in contention to challenge for a first outright victory at the world’s greatest race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, since Carroll Shelby (USA) and Roy Salvadori (GBR) triumphed in the Aston Martin DBR1 66 years ago this week.

Developed by Aston Martin and THOR from the Valkyrie production model, the LMH version is the only car in the WEC’s premier category derived from a road-legal hypercar and is also the only car built to Hypercar homologation that competes simultaneously in WEC and the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship.

The race-optimised Valkyrie Hypercar carbon-fibre chassis is powered by a modified lean-burn iteration of the sensational naturally-aspirated 6.5-litre V12 Cosworth-developed engine, which in standard road-going form revs to 11,000rpm and develops more than 1000bhp. For competition purposes, the engine – which persists at the heart of the entire Valkyrie bloodline – adheres to a strict 500kw (680bhp) regulation power limit.

For Le Mans, the Aston Martin THOR Team returns to the three-driver line-ups that it ran with for the WEC season opener – the Qatar 1812km at Lusail – in February.

Aston Martin’s endurance racing legacy is indelibly linked to Le Mans. A mere 15 years after the marque was formed by Robert Bamford and Lionel Martin, it was racing at la Sarthe; its debut coming in 1928 with a pair of AM415 ‘Internationals’. Three years later it claimed its first victory when Augustus Cesare Bertelli and Maurice Harvey won the 1.5-litre class in an International. It took class honours in 1932 and ’33 as well. Two more wins in the ’30s for the Ulster meant that Aston Martin ended the pre-war era as one of Le Mans pre-eminent manufacturers.

This century Aston Martin has come to the fore once again as one of the truly great GT manufacturers. Returning to the race with a GT1 class podium in 2006, Darren Turner, Rickard Rydell and David Brabham recorded a famous victory over Corvette with the mighty V12-powered DBR9 in 2007. Aston Martin Racing repeated the victory the following year. In the WEC era, which began in 2012, Aston Martin has added five more class victories with Vantage, the most recent in 2022.