Aston Martin chief designer Miles Nurnberger on the AM-RB 001

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.”