What Makes The Aston Martin Valkyrie's Cosworth RA Engine So Impressive

There are few icons more important to British performance cars than legendary Formula One engine-smith Cosworth and Aston Martin. For the construction of the Aston Martin Valkyrie supercar, the two engineering houses joined forces again after the first reveal in 2016, with Cosworth doing the lion's share in the engine department. The resulting powerplant is the Cosworth RA V12, an engine that Goodwood Road & Racing called one of the best V12 engines ever made. That's high praise considering that V12s have been the bread and butter of automakers like Lamborghini, Ferrari, and Mercedes-AMG for decades.

The Cosworth RA is utterly obscene no matter how you look at it. The car itself, the Valkyrie, is just as mind-boggling. It has all the high-revving cacophony of a Formula One car with all of the design principles and otherworldly styling and aerodynamics of a current Le Mans prototype car. There's not a lot on the road quite like it.   

Right off the bat, the mere specifications of the Cosworth RA don't even make sense — the only one that's even comparable to other engines is the physical space it occupies as it has a displacement of 6.5 liters. Everything else looks like the qualities of an aircraft engine. It redlines at 11,100 rpm. Eleven. Thousand. That's high for a compact superbike engine, much less a relatively beefy V12. It also generates 1,000 horsepower, because why not? To make matters more interesting, the Valkyrie is a hybrid, with the help of an electric motor, power is further boosted to 1,140 horsepower.

Additionally, and perhaps the most important bit of information, it's naturally aspirated. Aston Martin and Cosworth took one look in the direction of turbochargers and superchargers and decided the technology wasn't worth the time. To quote a press release from Aston Martin: "... the greatest driver's car of the modern era demands an internal combustion engine that sits at the absolute pinnacle for performance, excitement and emotion. This means the uncompromising purity of natural aspiration." That's confidence.

The engine is also remarkably light for what it is. Aston Martin notes that it weighs just over 454 pounds. For comparison, a universally praised 5-liter Coyote V8 from Ford weighs 445 pounds. Ford's engine is smaller, weighs about the same, and makes significantly less horsepower. To be fair to other engines, the Cosworth RA isn't going into what any rational person would call a real "production car" like a Lamborghini or Ferrari. The Valkyrie is street-legal only in Europe and Aston Martin is only making 150 of them.