Watch Fernando Alonso Rag The Aston Martin Valhalla Around Monaco

Fernando Alonso is not having a good F1 season. Seven races in, he hasn’t scored a single point, which is a bit of a shame for a man with two World Drivers’ Championships and 32 race wins to his name.

Evidently, ahead of this weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix, his team has seen fit to cheer him up by letting him loose in something he’ll soon probably be able to get his hands on via one of the world’s most attractive company car schemes: the Aston Martin Valhalla.

Aston’s upcoming mid-engined, plug-in hybrid supercar is in its final stages of development, with deliveries set to kick off in the second half of the year. Fernando’s hot lap is our first proper opportunity to see and hear an undisguised near-production Valhalla in action.

And speaking of sound, it’s not quite the thunder we were hoping for from its 4.0-litre twin-turbocharged Mercedes-AMG V8. That’s likely because, unlike most other applications of this engine (bar the Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series), the Valhalla features a flat-plane crank.

The trade-off for that slightly flatter, less rumbly soundtrack will likely be a revvier character, a bit more suited to the Valhalla’s ultra-high-performance mission statement. As a reminder, the engine – developing 817bhp on its own – works as part of a plug-in hybrid system (the first of its kind for Aston) alongside a trio of electric motors. The peak figures are 1064bhp and 811lb ft.

Aston reckons on 0-62mph in 2.5 seconds and a 217mph top speed, figures we’d say put it firmly somewhere around the increasingly blurred line between supercars and hypercars – it’s essentially as quick to 62, and only 3mph slower at the top end, than Aston’s own hypercar halo, the Valkyrie.

In case you needed a reminder of the cruel and unrelenting passage of time, the second half of 2025, when the first of the 999 people who’ll be clearing garage space for their Valhalla can expect to receive it, is barely over a month away. We suspect that, if Alonso does have his name down for one, he’ll be rather more excited about it after having a go. Certainly, it probably beats climbing into the cockpit of the AMR25 again.