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Throughout our Valkyrie series of blogs we have tried to communicate the immense complexity of the project. Adrian Newey’s uncompromising vision of making the most extreme road car ever to wear number plates meant that components of an adequate specification simply did not exist. Aston Martin and Adrian were going where no road car had gone before.
The gearbox is a hidden but ultra-critical core component that would be responsible for transferring 1161hp to the rear wheels. It needed to be compact but possess immense strength. Aston Martin partnered with driveline and transmission experts, Ricardo.
While a breed of paddle-shift-equipped sports and supercars claim to have “F1-style” gearboxes, they are not particularly closely linked. This style of “F1 light” gearbox has been around the car market for 30 year, it is only now that it can truly be claimed that a gearbox mirrors the uncompromising design and engineering of a contemporary F1 car’s transmission.
The gearbox in Valkyrie is a single-clutch 7-speed Automated Manual Transmission (AMT). There is no automatic mode -you the driver must request each gearshift. A sequence of blue, red and green shift lights mounted in the steering wheel illuminate to help you time your upshifts, however the engine will run into its rev limiter if you don’t shift quickly enough. It will shift back to first gear as you pull to a stop though.
There is now a prevalence of dual clutch transmission in the market so you might wonder why Aston Martin and Red Bull did not take this route. Whilst they are very slick, the single-clutch format has vital benefits. It is both considerably lighter and more compact than the DCT alternative. To Adrian, packaging and weight were absolutely paramount.
A key principle applied to every aspect of the Valkyrie is that all elements of the car needed to have dual benefits to the vehicle. In the case of the gearbox, the first and most obvious is to transmit power from the Valkyrie’s 1001bhp naturally aspirated V12 petrol engine and 160bhp e-motor; the second is for its casing to serve as the Valkyrie’s load-bearing rear sub-frame and mounting point for the rear crash structure.
To cope with the speed at which the gearbox needed to think and keep up with the rest of the operations in Valkyrie, it is fitted with a staggeringly fast electronic control system. The set up allows gearbox software to process information 5 times faster than any other road car.
The gearbox also had to fulfil apparently impossible packaging challenges. This is where a huge benefit of the single clutch set up came in. As a consequence the gearbox had to be tall and narrow in order to fit within the confined space available between the Valkyrie’s huge underfloor aerodynamic tunnels. This required the primary and secondary gear shafts to be stacked on top of one another with final drive on top of that. The main gear cluster is sited as low as possible within the casing for the best centre of gravity.
High-strength aluminium alloy envelopes the gearbox. It was chosen because it enjoys excellent structural properties. Interestingly, in F1 they use a carbon fibre casing which you would assume would be the go-to option for the Valkyrie. Whilst this was considered, it was timescales that stopped it. It has never been done for the road and so as part of development, the team would have had to have tested the long term fatigue properties of the material as it aged over many years to ensure it remained robust for decades to come. Only by making the casing from alloy could Ricardo be certain of achieving the necessary durability.
To have created a gearbox with both the internal strength to cope with such colossal power and also the external strength to cope with the stress and weight of the sub-frame, rear suspension and crash structure is remarkable. To achieve this whilst being compact enough to fit between the Valkyrie’s two huge Venturi tunnels is a masterpiece of packaging. Many sleepless nights were clearly had on this project.
•Completely new transmission designed and manufactured by British engineering firm, Ricardo, to Red Bull Advanced Technologies specification and layout. Hand-built in Warwickshire.
•7-forward gears (no auto function). No reverse gear to save weight -e-motor used for reverse drive
•Gearbox uses state-of the-art technology and principles taken directly from Formula 1® -a first for a road car application
•The strongest, most compact 7 speed transmission fitted to a road car.
•Gearbox casing created to withstand an incredible structural load. It is able to bear the loads from the sub-frame for rear suspension and rear crash structure
•Electronic control system employs bespoke software capable of processing information from the gearbox every millisecond -five times faster than current state-of-the-art road cars