You Can Buy A Copy Of Aston Martin’s Le Mans Loser For Just $5 Million

If you’re an incredibly wealthy person who loves going fast on track you have probably already received your Ferrari 499P Modificata, the track-only version of the Prancing Horse that has won Le Mans two years in a row. If you aren’t cool enough for Ferrari, or perhaps don’t want to go quite that fast, or you think hybrids are woke, then you should call up Aston Martin to ask if you can be one of the ten people to buy its new Valkyrie LM, the track-only version of the car that will more than likely qualify in last place at Le Mans later this week. Aston Martin hasn’t won Le Mans, or anything else, with the Valkyrie, in fact it looks to be one of the least competitive machines to race there in recent memory, but at least it looks cool and sounds really good. 

Aston Martin

Like the Aston Martin Valkyrie race car running at Le Mans, the Valkyrie LM also lacks the hybrid system found in the street version of the vehicle. Instead of the 1,139 horsepower of mind-bending speed that any old regular joe can go buy at the Aston Martin dealer and drive home, the Valkyrie LM makes do with a pedestrian 697 ponies from its 6.5-liter “lean-burn” version of the Cosworth V12 from the race car, tuned to accept pump gas. Aston made a few deviations from the race car to ensure the car is “accessible for customers to experience and enjoy,” meaning they dumbed down the Valkyrie LM to make sure whatever rich guy buys this thing doesn’t stuff it in the wall on lap one.  

I would bet that most of these will be immediately moved into cold storage and never see the light of day again, but if you’re a particularly adventurous rich guy Aston will offer to store and transport your Valkyrie LM around the world to “exclusive driver development programs” which include access to track days organized by Aston with your own personal engineers and driver coaches offering data analysis, classroom sessions, and driving instruction.

“In all its forms, there is nothing on Earth that compares to Valkyrie,” says Aston Martin CEO, Adrian Hallmark. Going on to say that the Valkyrie is the “only competitive hypercar bred from a road car.” It’s odd that Aston considers the Valkyrie competitive, when its best finish in WEC thus far has been 14th and its best finish in IMSA has been 8th. I guess it hasn’t lost a race against any of the LMGT3 class cars yet, so that’s something. Ahead of next weekend’s 24 Hours of Le Mans the Valkyrie LMH appears to be battling for worst of the Hypercar class with Peugeot. During the recent Le Mans Test Day Aston posted times over three seconds a lap off the pace-leading Toyotas, good enough for 18th and 20th out of 21 cars in the class, just a handful of seconds clear of the fastest LMP2 cars. 

If you have the spare $5 million for your own Valkyrie LM you’ll probably still be among the fastest things to turn up to your local trackday, unless a guy with the full-power hybrid Valkyrie AMR Pro shows up, or a 499P Modificata, I suppose.