Valkyrie Spider is peak Aston Martin V12

It will do 205mph with the roof off, and 217mph with the roof on. It weighs only a “marginal” amount more than the coupe and gets the Valkyrie’s hybrid V12 powertrain in unchanged 1,176PS (865kW) form. 

There are to be 85 of them made, with first deliveries next year, and Aston say they are all spoken for – probably to a good few of the people who crowded around it at a private viewing at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in California where it was unveiled. Each car will cost a reported £3.5m

Why not Valkyrie Volante we wonder? Aston’s not saying, but, unless anyone knows different, this is the first time an Aston convertible has been badged as Spider, normally a tag associated with the Italians and McLaren. 

Whatever the name, Aston and collaborator in the Valkyrie project Adrian Newey of Red Bull say the car remains entirely faithful to the Valkyrie ethos. Here is an extreme hypercar designed to deliver LMP1 pace around a circuit – just with added wind in the hair.

The carbon structure has had to be modified and new dihedral doors added in place of the coupe’s gullwing type, but other than that and the addition of a (manually fitted) carbon roof panel remarkably little has changed. Incidentally Aston says the roof panel can be “simply lifted off and stowed away” – though presumably stowed at home, because we can’t imagine there is space in the car to take it with you. 

“What you see is a simple removable roof panel, but the challenge of remaining true to the Valkyrie concept was anything but,” says Red Bull Racing’s chief technical officer, Adrian Newey. 

“Right from the very beginning of the Aston Martin Valkyrie project we were driven by exacting targets that went way beyond any previous road car and the Valkyrie Spider brings that same ethos to the open cockpit hypercar category.”

Aston says the Valkyrie’s aerodynamic performance is maintained with the roof removed. Thanks to the venturi underneath the car, it still offers 1,400kg of downforce at 150mph without resorting to big wings. 

Development of Aston’s first Spider is underway but there is no prototype yet; physical testing is still to come, and much anticipated by Aston chief exec Tobias Moers who told us: “The sound of that 6.5-litre V12 engine revving to over 11,000rpm with the roof removed is something I cannot wait to hear.”