The year was 2019, the FIA World Endurance Championship had survived the Dieselgate-prompted departures of Audi and Porsche from the LMP1 category and was preparing to welcome a new class of car to the top of the sportscar racing pyramid. The class would be called Hypercar and had confirmed entries from Toyota, Glickenhaus, Peugeot and Aston Martin.

Planning to debut their new Valkyrie racer into the class that would accept road car-based entries to compete for overall wins for the first time since the late 1990s, it looked set to be an emphatic return for the much loved brand to the top flight of endurance competition. The cars were due to enter in the 2020/2021 winter-summer WEC season, and Aston Martin would have a chance of competing for overall wins for the first time since 2011. The car that looked like it was born to go to Le Mans would make it there. It was going to be perfect, but then 2020 happened.

Having fallen into financial difficulties, Aston Martin received significant investment from a consortium led by Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, who had saved the Force India F1 team from dissolution the year prior. People on the outside put two and two together, and the Racing Point F1 team would be rebranded to Aston Martin for 2021. It was clear where the focus would be for the company’s racing ambitions, and as such the Valkyrie LMH project was placed on an indefinite hiatus in February 2020, with the world grinding to a halt just a few weeks later in the wake of the announcement.

However, in the second half of 2023, interesting reports started appearing in podcasts and on the Dailysportscar website; the Valkyrie racer was not dead, and work was underway to get the car to race competitively at long last. All they needed to do was make it official. So why the change of heart? 

To cut a long story very short, the two championships where top-level endurance prototypes ply their trades are the FIA WEC - which has the 24 Hours of Le Mans as its starring event - and the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship in the United States of America. The European and American-based championships used to share technical rulesets and it was common for top-category cars in one championship to race in the other; Peugeot preferred the Le Mans Series, while Audi opted for the American Le Mans Series for the most part.

Eventually, IMSA and the WEC diverged for their top class formulae, with IMSA favouring privateer-friendly cost-capped cars known as DPi, as the ACO opted for the fabulously fast, powerful aero-dependent and incredibly expensive LMP1 hybrids. 

The manufacturers and the teams filled the DPi ranks in no time, while post-2013 LMP1 peaked at four factory teams, with valiant privateer efforts from BR Engineering and Rebellion Racing. One category collapsed, the other garnered more interest. When it became time for the rulesets to be rewritten, there was one word on everyone’s lips: convergence. 

Could rules to allow brands to build their own cars from scratch, or modify an existing car be balanced together to allow two routes into the biggest endurance races in the world? Thankfully, yes. And this is where we begin to get back on track.

The Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO) created the Le Mans Hypercar (LMH) ruleset while IMSA evolved the DPi formula to create Le Mans Daytona h (LMDh - nobody knows what the “h” stands for) formula. IMSA’s regulations see cars being built around one of four specified chassis, a spec hybrid system being attached to an OEM engine, and a prototype racer being restyled with manufacturer-specific cues, like the Porsche 963. LMH sees the brand making the entire car from scratch, like Ferrari have for their 499P.

Aston Martin watched from afar as a new golden age in sportscar racing began without them, but with the company returning to profitability and an interested party willing to work with them to take the Valkyrie to competitive racing, the stars finally re-aligned for the project. Now in 2024, Aston Martin have officially announced the Valkyrie AMR-LMH programme in conjunction with US-based team The Heart of Racing. Following testing with a modified AMR Pro mule, the first laps have been turned by a purpose-built Valkyrie AMR-LMH at Donnington Park and Silverstone.

So with the history out of the way, it’s time to focus on the present and the future. While it’s evolved from the AMR Pro model, the AMR-LMH is not just a track-only hypercar with a number panel on the sides. It will be powered by the same 6.5 litre naturally aspirated V12 engine, but it won’t be making the 1,000 bhp and hitting the 11,000 rpm rev limiter of the production model.

Instead, Aston Martin say that the revised, “lean burning” Cosworth engine has been tweaked to withstand the long flat-out runs that modern endurance racing sees. LMH and LMDh cars are capped at 671 bhp before the Balance of Performance (BoP) adjustments give and take power and weight to ensure that cars of different shapes, sizes and powertrains can compete in the same ballpark. The racing Valkyrie differs further from the AMR Pro by dispensing with the hybrid system and appears to adopt a different aerodynamic concept to the ground-effect road and track cars.