Hard in the matter. Friendly in tone.

I see everything and understand nothing. That is the position of the fool. Or, to put it in a positive light, that of the narrator who knows everything but still feels nothing. The helicopter tilts slightly to one side, and for a moment everything is in view. Seen from above, the Circuito de Navarra in northern Spain looks like a Chinese character, tattooed onto a green-brown surface. There are a few minutes left to ponder what that Chinese character might stand for. A provocation? (If you’re too slow, I’m too fast!) A word of encouragement? (The later you brake, the longer you drive fast!) Or, as with so many young people on their backs, the classic: sweet-and-sour duck?

Enough chit-chat. The driver wants to concentrate on the landing. And anyway, down in the pit lane there’s a car waiting where the concept of distance is, at best, purely abstract. Most likely when it comes to the price, which in itself creates a healthy distance from people who travel to the racetrack by Uber or hire car rather than by helicopter. The rest is direct. And I mean the sort of directness you’d normally only get from your best friend when you sheepishly admit what a daftie you’ve been, and he tells you straight to your face: ‘And you’re ugly too.’

This sets out the framework for the track experience with the Aston Martin Valhalla. Aston Martin’s first V8 hybrid mid-rear-engined supercar. 1,079 PS, 1,100 Newton metres of torque, a top speed of 350 km/h. Doors that swing forwards and upwards. A carbon-fibre bucket seat anchored so low in the floor that the driver’s hips sit lower than their knees. It is the uncompromising ergonomics of a racing car, which at the same time forces a surprisingly comfortable, semi-reclined posture.

The Valhalla is parked in the pit lane, painted light blue, with orange accents on the front splitter, side skirts, brake calipers and rear diffuser. Aston Martin calls it Elwood Blue; it is the second of six colour schemes proposed by the manufacturer, though every customer can, of course, configure the Valhalla to match their own helicopter. The air swirls over the two exhaust pipes jutting upwards. Right at the very bottom of the rear are two further exhaust pipes. And the Valhalla certainly needs them! With that menacing rumble and a paint finish like this, your mind immediately races through a series of lightning-fast flashes of memory: Ford GT40, Porsche 917, Le Mans, Gulf Racing. Cut! None of it has even the slightest connection to the history of the Aston Martin brand. Is this British humour? The Valhalla hints at a heritage that was never its own. It exudes a deep self-assurance, nonchalance and elegance. That only makes one all the more curious.

Get in. Fasten your seatbelt. Adjust the pedals and steering wheel. Close the door. The way the Valhalla fits around the driver is somewhat like slipping into a suit of high-tech armour. It is an artificial construct of carbon fibre, aluminium, cables, electronics and motors, in which the distinction between the human and the technical spheres dissolves or merges against the backdrop of the body-mind dualism of a hybrid form of existence. Got it? No? Drawing on decades of motorsport history, sports car development and even pop culture, the creators at Aston Martin have extracted an incredible wealth of knowledge and insights and, like alchemists of the moving body, have ultimately created the Valhalla. 

It is exclusively about experiencing the body – or rather, physicality – as a discursive construction in the truest sense of the word. Of course, this is only possible on the racetrack. For only the racetrack allows an unclouded, clear and carefree view of the phantasmagoria and myths at the frontier between nature and technology. Against this backdrop, a further note on the track marker in Navarra: the run-off area at the fastest and blind bend is tarmacked. In other words: it’s going to be intense! More on that later.

It’s really time I got out of this pit lane now. Final instructions over the radio and a ”Have fun!” There’s nothing at stake, and yet my gaze is fixed on the Aston Martin man’s hand in front of the Valhalla, just like a racing driver staring at the starting lights in the final race of the season. I don’t blink. A quick wave. The signal to set off. It’s all very easy. The pit lane is very long. Plenty of time for my nervous system to rev up to the max. Then, at the wheel of the Valhalla – with its more than 1,000 PS and the instructor in the passenger seat – I cross the white line at the pit lane exit. I just put my foot right down.

Because I can.

Any trained monkey could do that.

The acceleration is immense; it’s impossible to describe. The reader will simply have to take my word for it. And the chassis! ‘Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo’, as the Latins would say: hard in the matter. Friendly in tone.

Strictly speaking, what’s actually carrying me at this moment isn’t really experience at all; it’s a calculation. The front and rear axles have no physical connection to one another. No driveshaft running through the centre, no mechanical link. At the front, a system called Torque Vectoring distributes power to each wheel individually; at the rear, an electronic limited-slip differential takes over; both are controlled by software that constantly calculates how the car should actually be behaving at that very moment. Two axles that never touch and yet are one. The Valhalla achieves what many long-distance relationships fail to. Isn’t that marvellous?

Oops! I nearly missed the braking point. The instructor in the passenger seat – let’s call him Ricardo – offers a calm reminder. Lap after lap, Ricardo talks more and more. I’m about to turn in. Ricardo says: “Wait, wait … and now.” I’m about to take my foot off the accelerator and brake. Ricardo says: “Keep your foot right down and turn in here.” I keep my foot right down and am about to turn in. Ricardo says: “Brake, brake, brake!” I’m about to take a bend. Ricardo points ahead and says: “Straight!” The more laps we do together, the more we resemble an old married couple, where one is driving and the other finds fault with every decision. Back home, I’ll tell my friends, feeling a bit dejected, that he was actually right about everything and that I’ll of course give him another chance next time. And my friends will nod sympathetically. But inside, they’ll be thinking: ‘What a loser! And he’s ugly, too.’

Right. Cut. Enough of the schoolboy act. Well done so far. 

So, once again: slam on the brakes. Turn in. The rear end lightens up. Step on the accelerator. Too much. The rear end breaks away. Counter-steer. No chance left. Slam on the brakes. I skid across the track boundary into the tarmac run-off area. Then I regain control of the car. This spin-off and the immediate sense of powerlessness that follows – after I had considered myself invincible just fractions of a second earlier – evoke within me a deeply contradictory and oscillating sphere of humanity: warrior and victim at the same time, subject and object, filled with a belief in a mission on the one hand, yet tormented by fears of losing control on the other. The scene marks the – yes, one must use this term with the racetrack in mind – climax of the story, even if Valhalla has just been clearly missed.

A bit of theory at this point. Especially as the head of the Dynamics and Performance department happens to have the surname Newton. Simon Newton, to be precise. The fact that someone like him is talking about G-forces and newton-metres in the context of a highly emotional hypercar featuring unique technical solutions only makes the whole thing all the more exciting. Unfortunately, in the original, Simon Newton did not speak with the lofty voice and theatrical vocabulary of an intellectual dramatist – the sort one would hope for from a narrator tackling such an impressive subject as the Valhalla. That is why the quote has been given a little editorial polish here. After all, ideally, it should have the same effect on the stage of a grand opera house, with an audience in their finest evening wear. So, curtain up! Enter Simon Newton. He pauses briefly, allowing the silence in the hall to create the appropriate atmosphere for the moment. Then these words:

‘The primary teleological immanence with which engineering and the practitioners of dynamic phenomenology found themselves confronted did not manifest itself in the mere accommodation of the brutal eruption of its hybrid nature, but rather in the syntagmatic chaining of this elemental force by means of a coherent dialectic of active aerodynamics and cybernetic dynamic control. In the face of a nominal output of 1079 PS and a torque of 1100 Nm, kinetic transcendence degenerates into a tautological triviality. The true ingenuity of the undertaking lies rather in the hermeneutics of performance at the limits: the synthesis of Apollonian precision, phenomenological affectogenesis and excessive acceleration on the racetrack, without thereby deconstructing the everyday articulability and the ontology of affect inherent in a road-going supercar. It is precisely this unparalleled heuristic of dynamism that sets the Valhalla apart from its merely imitative rivals and grants it a unique meontological status within the supercar discourse.”

Thunderous applause! A standing ovation! A flurry of camera flashes. Shouts of ‘encore, encore’ lasting several minutes.

Back to the original. And you have to say, my word, it looks good: the cold, clear headlights, the grin of the radiator grille. It’s mad, but you’re prepared to forgive a lot in a car with such a brutally clean-cut front end. Especially as beneath the aesthetically designed Valhalla silhouette lies ironclad discipline and an unyielding will. A pure performance machine.

Five more laps. Ricardo once more.

At the end of the session, the friendly instructor gets out, taps the roof of the Valhalla and says: ”Have a good day.” I ask if he’s being serious. ”For a journalist,’”he says, letting the pause hang in the air – the pause that makes the sentence theatrically complete.

I reckon we’re best mates now.