Andy Palmer was the CEO of Aston Martin for six years, and while sponsoring the British car brand, Palmer sponsored Red Bull Racing and together they were responsible for building the ultimate hypercar, the Valkyrie. In an interview with GPblog.com, Palmer talks about how the partnership with the Austrian F1 team worked.
Before joining Aston Martin, Palmer worked for Nissan for 23 years. “At Nissan I was the chairman of Infinity, and Infinity had a longstanding relationship with Red Bull. When I left Nissan they decided to end the relationship with Red Bull and this opened the obvious opportunity to bring the relationship with Aston, but not just as a sticker on the car, “says Palmer.
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Perez and Verstappen on the same page: “Keep both feet on the ground”.
Verstappen and the Valkyrie
It was about more than just a partnership for the stage. “I needed a halo vehicle for Aston and Adrian Newey wanted to make a street car. Knowing that, there was an opportunity. There was a meeting between four people in a pub with sausage, porridge and beer. It was Adrian Newey, Christian Horner, Simon Spoule and I. This is where the idea of Valkyrie was born. Valkyrie was legitimized by bringing Red Bull experience and therefore Red Bull held the Aston Martin brand. Yes, it was a Red Bull sponsorship, eventually a title sponsorship, but it did was had more to do with this real Valkyrie product that Newey brought all of his knowledge of F1 racing to use, and with my knowledge and the knowledge of other people in the company, especially David King, that we bring these together and the final suction product could manufacture the largest petrol-engined car that ever existed. “
From Red Bull, however, it wasn’t just Newey who was deeply involved in the Valkyrie; Max Verstappen also played a role. “Max was involved. It is important that they drove the original vehicles and that the settings were basically made accordingly. Yes, the F1 drivers were involved, along with a few other professional drivers. A lot of work was done on the Red bull simulator. So it has a real F1 pedigree, behaves amazingly well on the test tracks, but also has to perform on the road because it’s a road car. “
Aston Martin engine for Red Bull?
Aston Martin was the title sponsor of Horner and Helmut Marko’s team for many years, but wasn’t the company interested in expanding its partnership with Red Bull by supplying engines? “There was a time when we really thought about going into engine manufacturing,” says Palmer. “We were working with an engine manufacturer at the point where Renault was on the way out and Honda wasn’t on the way in.” . ”
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“Cowell is one of 50 employees who are moving from Mercedes to Red Bull”
He continued, “It looked like Red Bull had no solution, so we partnered with the FIA to make sure that future engines could be made on a reasonably low budget. So cost caps and engine configuration. In the context where the hybridization was less we felt we could find a solution, but ultimately that wasn’t the way to go. So the kinetic energy recovery system goes on and that is perhaps the hardest part of the F1 engine. So came Honda and had a much more robust solution than we would if we went through a development cycle, so it was a serious consideration for a while, “said Palmer.
New F1 engines in 2025
New engine regulations appear to be coming into Formula 1 in 2025. Where does Palmer hope they will go? “Where I hope F1 engines are used, I hope they take full advantage of the net-zero option. F1 is supposed to be up to date. F1 can’t become a dinosaur. You could argue about FE, which is good, but sometimes it feels a little like F1 has to stay relevant. I hope this happens by pushing the frontier on synthetic fuel. In other words, they can hit net zero not by just going to EV, but by they switch to synthetic fuel. I hope that F1 becomes the marketing tool for this alternative fuel. “
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