Aussie F1 driver sticks his hand up for hypercar development role

Grand-Prix winning Australian driver Daniel Ricciardo is pleading with his bosses to become the first test and development driver for the astonishing beyond-hypercar AM-DB 001.

After the star drove a Red Bull F1 car up the Aston Martin production line, he helped pull the covers off the extravagantly aerodynamic 2019 and promptly begged Aston CEO Andy Palmer to get in on the car’s ground floor.

“I’d love to help develop it,” Ricciardo told an adoring crowd of Aston Martin production-line workers.

“It’s fantastic. I’ve never seen anything like it. I saw the model in Monaco during the Grand Prix weekend, but I hadn’t seen the car.

“I want to be involved. I am ready to go,” the Aussie F1 star stated.

Designed largely by Red Bull Racing’s engineering and aerodynamics impresario Adrian Newey and styled and to be built by Aston Martin in a deal done over bangers and mash in an English pub, the AM-RB 001 is already on Ricciardo’s “want” list, though he’s just taken delivery of a DB9.

“That was the delay in signing the new contract, actually. I wanted it [the AM-RB 001] for free in the contract but I ended up getting the car for free and having to pay for the tyres,” he joked.

While having Newey and his boss, Chris Horner, involved will help clear the way for Ricciardo to go road-car testing, it also helps that Aston Martin’s winged badge sits on the nose of his Red Bull Racing F1 car.

And, its design driver Adrian Newey has revealed, some of the key ideas for the car are more than 30 years old, even though it won’t turn a wheel in testing until the end of next year and won’t be available to customers until the end of 2019.

“In some ways it’s been an evolution of ideas that I have had over the years,” Newey said.

“I have thrown them all in a box and some of them are here, some are mutually exclusive and some are rubbish.

“I did this car realistically as an evening/weekend hobby project starting last spring, but it became more serious with Aston Martin once we started looking at the implications of homologation.

“I actually did a project in my final-year thesis on ground effects applied to a sports-racing car. Ground Effects was understood and demonstrated in Formula One then but had not been picked up with sports cars and there are certain similarities to that car from 30 years ago,” Newey said.



It helps even more that the performance targets for the 1000bhp, sub-1000kg car effectively demand the skill set, reflexes and engineering nous of a current Formula One or LMP1 driver.

The AM-RB 001 already tantalizes with the prospect of becoming one of the industry’s flag-on-Everest cars, like the McLaren F1 or the Bugatti Veyron, with Newey insisting the 20 track-only versions will lap at about the same pace as current Le Mans-style LMP1 cars.

With a price tag of up to £3m and a production run of between 99 and 150 cars, the V12 hybrid’s performance will be limited by road-car homologation laws, rather than arbitrary Formula 1 regulations.

Its pedal positioning will force the drivers feet high, like a current F1 car, though Newey insists it will be comfortable for two tall people, incorporate aircon, can carry an overnight bag and will be easy to drive.