We designed our own £850k Aston Martin Valhalla and the result was... brown

Aston Martin’s configurator for its new Valhalla opens up with the car in full F1 spec. Digitally parked on the Las Vegas strip during race weekend with the Vantage safety car and DBX medical car behind, it’s painted in the same green paint as the underperforming 2025 company cars of Messrs Alonso and Stroll.

It’s a great spec for the new 1,064bhp mid-engined hybrid Valhalla supercar, with the aero-heavy lower body all left in exposed carbon fibre with a satin finish. The roof is the same, as is the grille and the rather gorgeous wing mirrors on their long stalks. The wheels are also black and there’s a pop of colour from the ‘AMR Lime’ brake calipers. The interior matches with all black trim, forged carbon and ‘Photon Lime’ stitching.

If I was spending my own £850,000 plus on a Valhalla, I might be tempted to stick with a similar look. It’ll be an easy one to re-sell after all. Sadly, this job doesn’t really allow us to save up that kind of cash, but it has thrown up the opportunity to head to Aston’s HQ at Gaydon for a speccing session with the Valhalla’s chief designer Sam Holgate, interior designer Adam MacKerron, product manager Tom Barker and Nicole Gee, strategy and planning manager for Aston’s special Q department. Time to get trigger happy with the options list.

And options matter, of course, because as new boss Adrian Hallmark told TopGear.com earlier in the year, other luxury brands have traditionally been better at upselling their customers than Aston, and that means there's money left on the table.

"Titanium exhaust, carbon wheels, high end audio, and so on," said Hallmark back in January. "The value of that alone is phenomenal.

"If you just took that and had normal levels of uptake like we get for the options we do sell, the per-year improvement in our bottom line – but more importantly in the customer fit with their needs – is massive. That’s one thing we’re working on intensively.”

So here we are then. Having decided to stick the car in a plain studio environment on the configurator as opposed to Vegas, the banking at Brooklands or in a Japanese garden, first up is paint. This is the first series production mid-engined Aston Martin supercar (the bonkers Valkyrie doesn’t really count as series production) and it looks mighty in the different shades of yellow and red that you’d expect to see on its Italian-speaking rivals. Want to go full Batmobile? You can even have it with no paint at all so the whole thing is exposed carbon.

“When I first started at Aston Martin, I remember seeing all the Vantages and DB9s lined up at customer events where people brought along their own cars,” says Holgate. “You can imagine at that time it was silver, silver, silver and more silver. Now when you see the cars leaving the factory they are a lot more vibrant. The cars have become more expressive and the way people are speccing them has become more adventurous.”

This is excellent news. As Barker clicks through the shades, I notice the option of ‘Magneto Bronze’. Essentially a fancy way of saying ‘brown’ as it turns out. Yep, that’s exactly what this bastion of British engineering needs right now – a paintjob inspired by the 1970s.

Incredibly, the Valhalla looks so dramatic it can even pull off metallic brown paint. I pair it with shiny gloss carbon for the lower half of the body (including that giant diffuser out back) to show off all the technical touches and then go for a painted black roof. It’s not an option on the configurator, but the Q department can do you a fully painted body in a single colour should you so desire. In fact, it seems as though Q can do just about anything you can think of if you’ve got pockets deeper than the English Channel. Think tinted carbon, paint fades and a whole lot more besides.

The room itself for customers to spec their cars is quite something too. Gaydon may not quite have the glamour of Maranello, but if you’re one of the 999 people buying a Valhalla, you’re able to visit the factory and take a tour of the production line before heading into the vault-like configuration room. A 5K screen stretches across one whole wall while behind me is an array of samples for things like paint, leather, Alcantara, stitching, badges (there are four possible options for the wings even before the Q team get involved) and even luggage.

Although there’s none of the latter for the Valhalla just yet because, well… it doesn’t have any luggage space. You might be able to squeeze a suit bag behind the passenger and a small briefcase under their knees thanks to the reclined, high-feet seating position, but you’ll need to pack light if you’re planning a weekend away in your new hybrid half-price hypercar.

You’d want to be okay with attracting a fair bit of attention if you followed our spec too. Got thick skin? Perhaps you’ll be interested in one of the bold ‘liveries’ that Aston has curated. I’ve selected ‘Theme 6’ in ‘Club Sport White’ for maximum coverage of a second colour, but again Q is able to customise the look to bring in bits of each livery. I’d have liked to add a central racing stripe too to really show off that roof scoop behind the cabin. ‘Theme 4’ highlights the serrated side sills inspired by recent F1 cars, and also includes Alonso’s number 14 just behind the front wheel. Strangely, there’s no livery with number 18 for Stroll fans.

Wheel options are actually fairly limited. You’ll need to choose between the standard forged aluminium design in silver, black or diamond turned, or there’s a lighter forged magnesium option that’s available in a ‘Textured Titanium’ grey finish or satin black. I opt for the fancy magnesium wheels in the lighter shade, then am persuaded to go for blingy gold brakes by those in the room who do this for a living. I sense they’re trying to match accent colours with this brown body for the first time, despite having already had “a good chunk” of the customers in to spec their cars already.

“We’re getting more and more requests from customers for silver wheels,” says Barker while I explain my working.

“You’d be surprised how many Q requests we’ve had to paint the wheels bright silver,” adds Gee. Lots of Valhallas on their way to North America, perhaps? “We have a really bright option called Dutch Silver that we’re working on for the magnesium wheels. We’ve also had requests for them to be painted gold.”

I go for a gloss carbon finish on the grille to continue the dark exterior theme even though I’m a fan of the large Aston grille in its proper machined silver. Other exterior choices include clear glass, body-coloured mirrors and the brilliantly dramatic top-exit exhaust finished in the same ‘Textured Titanium’ as the wheels. See, I can get some things to match.

A sensible person would probably spec the interior with just a single colour for the leather or Alcantara trim, but Aston gives you the option of a duotone look and if you go for the leather, you can have contrast stitching in a third colour. Yes please. So, ‘Onyx Black’ and ‘Glacier White’ for the cow hide – the latter on the fixed carbon bucket seats so no wearing of blue jeans in here – and then ‘Copper Tan Metallic’ thread to bring some semblance of the exterior colour inside. I stop short of a white steering wheel – the fear of mucky hands from a petrol station chocolate bar is present even with this particular car set to remain in the virtual world. Probably for the best. Aston is also introducing a chopped carbon look on the Valhalla, but it gives off major Mansory vibes so thankfully it can be swapped for the old-school woven stuff.

“This is the standard offering, and then the twill is an option,” says MacKerron. “I think we’re seeing 20 or 30 per cent of people going for this chopped carbon so it’s proving quite popular, but it is a love or hate thing.”

Apparently, some customers come in and know exactly what they want, right down to the name of the specific shade of green. That’s usually folk who spec each of their Astons to match, but the Valhalla’s mid-engined layout is bringing in new customers who might spend up to five hours in the room creating multiple different specs. Barker even describes this as a ‘conquest car’ with 50 per cent of buyers being completely new to Aston Martin ownership. If they then decide to go ‘off-menu’ with Q bits during the configuration process (Gee says that between 80 and 90 per cent of Valhalla buyers so far have done so), negotiations can apparently take up to six months to get the look exactly right. Oh, and unsurprisingly there are no prices on the Aston configurator. If you have to ask, etc.

Deliveries should begin towards the end of 2025, though I’m not sure anyone will have used the Top Gear Valhalla to take inspiration from. Still, no matter what spec you go for one thing about the car remains; if you peer over the clamshell in front of the windscreen you can see right through to the pushrod front suspension with its inboard springs and dampers. Ooft. We’d even be able to look past the brown paint to live with that sort of detail.