Z4 Roadster

Make
BMW
Segment
Compact

For a car that aims to be right on the cutting edge of automotive engineering, the Aston Martin AM-RB 001 has a surprisingly long back story. Yes, the project itself was only officially declared a few months ago, and the technical partnership between Red Bull Racing and Aston Martin that this car represents was only informally finalized back in January of this year, but there is far more to the utterly crazy hypercar's prologue than meets the eye. You could argue, in fact, that it's a tale that stretches back decades.

You see, Red Bull's design genius Adrian Newey hasn't just been realising his ambitions of becoming a phenomenal scribbler of incredibly competitive racing cars over his thirty-odd years in the business. Alongside off-shoot ventures into speed boat designs, Newey's also harboured ambitions to design a road car that, though still abiding to homologation regulations, would be far removed from the ever-stringent technical restrictions that dominate so many fields of modern day motorsport. It's a dream that stretches back to when Newey was sketching out bonkers supercar designs in the days of his youth, and the AM-RB 001 is the tightly formed knot that ties all those loose threads together.

On the Aston Martin side of things, the AM-RB hasn't spent as many years in the oven, but the British sports car maker has been dabbling with the idea for some time. Though we couldn't glean any precise origins details at the 001's reveal event, it was revealed that the DP-100 concept car was the firm's first legitimate flirtation with the idea of eventually manufacturing an extreme mid-engined road car. Fast forward a couple of years or so, and we find ourselves with a beast of a car that, whilst far more extreme than than the DP-100 was ever intended to be, can clearly be identified as closely related conceptually to the mock-up designed primarily (or so we thought at the time) for use in the Gran Turismo 6 racing game.

So, there you have it. Our case for why one of the most forward-thinking and potentially innovative performance cars ever made actually has a far more drawn out history than you may have originally thought.