Two things of note here.
The short of it is that if you want to make a car with a power to weight ratio of 1:1, you can’t afford to mess about. And if you’re any of Adrian Newey/Andy Palmer/Aston/Red Bull, or anyone else charging the other side of £2m on a hypercar, for that matter, you’d be disinclined to pick any duffers to work with.
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Of all the announced partners, the three headliners are Cosworth, Ricardo and Multimatic, and they’ve all got form in their respective fields.
Aston Martin says that its V12 engine is its own, but Cosworth has long been an Aston supplier and technical partner. And it’s no stranger to race engines, which the 001’s powerplant might as well effectively be, given the power and weight requirements.
Ricardo has superb form in transmissions, too, developing and manufacturing the Bugatti Veyron’s transmission – one of the most impressive technical achievements of the Veyron experience – plus the gearboxes (and engines) for McLaren’s road car range. And it, too, makes race transmissions.
Composite specialist Multimatic, finally, has worked with Aston Martin before on projects like the Vulcan and One-77, whose exposed structure is all of strong, beautiful and light. Oh, and hey, guess what? Multimatic is also a racing specialist: it developed, and builds, the current Ford GT racing car.
All three, then, have exquisite form in both high-end road and race applications. But even for them, this is an ambitious project. Hitting the weight target will be the hardest part. To sit between 900 and 1000 each of horsepower and kilograms, Aston, Red Bull and every partner will have to be on its best form.
Aston Martin Vulcan driven on track
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Good idea JJ
I have no objection at all to
Horses for courses
There is also great pleasure in just having the car - studying its design, trying to figure out the decisions that the aerodynamicists, the designers and the engineers made to produce the finished product. While that can be done with any car, most are built to a different set of priorities than cars such as these.
Paul Newman got respect because his driving talent was greater than his ego (it was "the first thing that I ever found I had any grace in") and not simply because he went racing. There are many other people running the teams that they drive and win with, but nobody ever hears of them, partly because they're not already famous. Conversely, other famous people with less driving skill have competed and got ridiculed for it.
The comment above by "anyone"