How Aston Martin and Red Bull Racing came up with their AM-RB 001 hypercar

SINGAPORE — You could, in some ways, describe this as a technical bromance of epic proportions: Adrian Newey, the Red Bull Racing Formula One Team’s chief technical officer; and Marek Reichman, Aston Martin’s chief creative officer and design director, spearheading a collaboration between both companies and coming to regard each other as mates, colleagues and partners in crime.

The result of the team’s efforts is the AM-RB 001, a hypercar that derives its hyper-ness not through brute force but through efficient simplicity of thought. The car, shaped like a large inverted wing, uses ground-effects aerodynamics to generate downforce. Why mar its shape with external wings, the thinking went, when the car’s entire body could be shaped like one?

Marek, who was in Singapore for the Asian debut of the AM-RB 001, spoke to TODAY about working with one of the world’s leading Formula One designers. Where many aerodynamicists today rely on wind tunnel data or computational fluid dynamics, Adrian still relies on proven, old-school methods: Paper and human imagination.

“The aerodynamic surfaces that you see on the underside of the car are generated in Adrian’s head first then drawn on paper. We scan this, we create a surface and then we do an aerodynamic test. Typically, we find that his surfaces are exactly where they need to be within a millimeter,” said Marek.

“That’s from his head, drawn in sections in the old-school way. And that’s the genius. It’s almost as if he sees air flow and understands the vortices and how to control the vortices to create ground effect.”

According to Marek, Adrian also designs with an eye for aesthetics.

“That’s the bit that I enjoy the most — that we can talk as designer to designer from aesthetic perspectives as well. We both have a very similar view in terms of beauty, proportion, simplicity,” Marek said.

EXCELLENT FIGURES

Aston Martin may be fashionably late to the mid-engined hypercar game, but it appears set to make a grand entrance with the AM-RB 001. The firm has revealed only a few details about the car’s specifications and design goals, but the figures revealed so far are stunning.

Aston Martin says, for instance, that the car will have a power-to-weight ratio of 1:1. So 1bhp would be used to push 1kg of weight. To put that into perspective, if your average modern family sedan had the same power-to-weight ratio, its engine would have to produce more than 1,200bhp — typical sedan engines produce about 130hp.

“It will generate 4Gs in lateral cornering, compared to the Ferrari LaFerrari’s 2Gs.” Marek said.

ASTON’S EXPERTISE

Such numbers are mind-boggling, but as the adage goes, power is nothing without control. And this is where Aston Martin’s expertise dovetails nicely with Red Bull’s capabilities.

Aston Martin helps ensure the car does not intimidate drivers and is user-friendly enough for you to drive it to the coffee shop for a teh tarik with your buddies.

“An (Aston Martin) DB11 is a higly capable car, it will do over 200mph. But it’s just as easy to drive at 30mph through a village. And it’s comfortable — it’s not cumbersome or difficult to drive,” said Marek.

“So it’s understanding how the setup of a car works in its extreme boundary as well as its low-speed comfort driving. And that’s the skill that we can bring because that’s what we can do on a daily basis.”