Aston Martin DBR9A Car That Looks Fast, Is FastAston Martin has unveiled the car that will take the famous marque back to Le Mans next year. The DBR9 is based on the DB9 coupe and was developed in conjunction with motorsport specialists Prodrive, who are best known for engineering the Subaru in which Petter Solberg won last year's World Rally Championship. It has already been tested in the UK and will make its race debut in the 12 hours of Sebring next March.
Just two Works cars will be entered in that first race and 2005 will be treated as a test-and-development year. By 2006, though, Aston expects to be fielding 12 Works entrants, with a further 20 cars being made available to privateers. Some of the latter may end up in car collections, but Aston is anxious to ensure that as many as possible are actually raced.
Each car will cost 475,000 ($880,000) plus local tax, although an upgrade kit that includes such niceties as carbon brakes will cost an extra 50,000 ($92,000). This princely sum supplies no more than the basic car, so the real cost of a season of GT racing is likely to be somewhere in the region of $4M. It's therefore far from cheap, but at the car's launch, Prodrive boss David Richards was adamant that "no part will be fitted to a Works car that cannot be specified by a customer."
Although Prodrive will operate the cars, Aston's CEO, Dr. Ulrich Bez, was quick to assert that he and his board of directors will make the headline decisions. Aston's in-house designers were also heavily responsible for the aesthetic modifications that have seen the elegant, understated DB9 coupe transformed into one of the most dramatic-looking sports cars in living memory. Although the basic silhouette is familiar, only the roof structure and the taillamps are carried over from the road car and the bodywork is now constructed from carbon fiber.
Arguably the most obvious modification is the introduction of a vast rear wing, which, according to the regulations, cannot protrude above the roof line, nor extend beyond the rear bumper. Dramatic wheelarch extensions, hood scoops, and front and rear diffusers are similarly designed to finesse the outer reaches of the newly drafted GT1 sports-car regulations. The green-and-yellow paint scheme of the first car, which looks much paler in the metal than it does in these photographs, has deliberately been designed to hark back to the Aston racers of yesteryear, including the 1959 Le Mans winning DBR1.
Some of the attention to detail is exquisite. Note for example, the fabulously delicate wing mirrors, or the slither of extruded aluminum that supports the steering column and is embossed with the Aston Martin logo. Richards expressed his confidence in the old motor-racing adage that "a car that looks fast, is fast."
To take a peek at the technical specification is to share some of Richard's confidence. The DB9's ultra-stiff, bonded aluminum chassis structure makes an ideal starting point for a racing car and its integrity has been further enhanced by the introduction of tubular steel roll cage, which wraps its way around the cabin. The latter is actually bonded to the chassis to maximize its rigidity.
The DBR9's 5935cc V12 engine is developed directly from the road car's lump. The rules forbid the use of exotic materials and introduce air restrictors to limit the power to around 600 bhp. The minimal weight for this class of car is 1,100kg so the power-to-weight ratio should be around 545kg/ton, more than twice that of the road car. A six speed Xtrac sequential gearbox is mounted near the rear axle and Prodrive's boffins estimate it will accelerate from 0 to100 mph in 6.5 sec.
Drivers and teams for the car have yet to be announced, but such is the allure of the Aston badge that many "big names" have already been associated with the project. Bobby Rahal has already expressed an interest in running a team, while British F1 veterans and former Le Mans winners Martin Brundle and Mark Blundell have expressed a desire to establish a "dream team" for 2006. Richards claimed nine teams have already shown a serious interest in running a car.
Dr. Bez explained that Aston rejected the idea of building a prototype Le Mans racer because the company wanted the racer to bear a close relationship to the road car. And with Lamborghini, Corvette and Maserati already committed to the GT class, his sentiments seem well founded. With a World GT Championship also on the horizon, possibly as early as 2006, we could be about to witness the start of another golden age for the formula that Richards describes as "the purest form of racing."