Currently reading: Aston Martin chief designer Miles Nurnberger on the AM-RB 001
Aston's design boss talks about the merits of working with Adrian Newey on the one of the world's most extreme production hypercars

With the recent reveal of the AM-RB 001, we caught up with Aston Martin's chief designer Miles Nurnberger to talk about the new hypercar.

How important is the AM-RB 001 for Aston Martin?

“It’s really pushing the envelope of what we can do. The way we’re working with Adrian Newey, the car is split between the core skills of the two companies.

“Aston Martin knows how to make a good-looking car, how to make it driveable on the public road and how to package people inside it. That’s not to say that Adrian doesn’t know how to package people, but the ones he deals with are racing driver size and packaged for a specific purpose.

“It feels very fresh to work on. We’re creating new solutions to the problems we’re discovering on the way, so it is quite exciting.”

How exciting has it been to work with Newey?

“We can see exactly why Adrian has won 10 world championships, because his ability to go through a rulebook and push the boundaries to their limits is stunning.

“The way racing teams package cars is to give everyone on their teams too little space and then you have to basically argue why you need it. That’s partly why this car is so small. We’re not bad at packaging our cars, but you see that different mentality to it.

“It’s fantastic to sit with him, because when we look at the car on a CAD screen, we look at the car’s upper surfaces, but he turns it upside down. He’ll talk us through every 50mm section of the car and exactly what the air is trying to do at every single point.”

How is the working relationship between Aston and Red Bull?

“There is a good basic trust between the parties. Adrian comes to us and says, ‘I want to channel air through here. Can you find a way to do that and still make the car look and feel like an Aston?’ It has to be both.

“We have a slight delineation [between Aston and Red Bull]. Everything you see that is green on the car — what we’d describe as ‘form’ by its nature — Aston has priority over. Everything dark grey — which is ‘control’ in nature — Adrian has the priority over the look and feel. So we came to quite a happy place.”

Read more:

Aston and Red Bull AM-RB 001 hypercar revealed - exclusive pictures

Q&A with Red Bull racing tech chief, Adrian Newey

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Steve Cropley

Steve Cropley Autocar
Title: Editor-in-chief

Steve Cropley is the oldest of Autocar’s editorial team, or the most experienced if you want to be polite about it. He joined over 30 years ago, and has driven many cars and interviewed many people in half a century in the business. 

Cropley, who regards himself as the magazine’s “long stop”, has seen many changes since Autocar was a print-only affair, but claims that in such a fast moving environment he has little appetite for looking back. 

He has been surprised and delighted by the generous reception afforded the My Week In Cars podcast he makes with long suffering colleague Matt Prior, and calls it the most enjoyable part of his working week.

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Cyborg 5 July 2016

Aston

Looks like an exciting project, but I want to hear about specs and performance. They're saying nothing about those essential elements. Which makes me believe all they really have at the moment is that life-size model and nothing more...that's disappointing! They revealed what they revealed here prematurely...Palmer & Co should of remained shtum until there was much more meat on the bone.