Aston Martin’s lineup of exciting mid-engine sports cars can trace their roots back to a Gran Turismo game from 2014. In an interview with CarsGuide, Aston Martin Chief Creative Officer, Marek Reichman explained the impact of the game on Aston Martin. What started out as a fun design exercise to celebrate 15 years of Aston Martin’s participation in the game franchise turned into a legitimate lineup of high-performance mid-engined cars.
In 2013 Gran Turismo introduced the Vision Gran Turismo feature which allowed car manufacturers to release digital concept cars in the game for the player to enjoy. Aston Martin joined this program in 2014 with the release of the mid-engine DP-100. This mid-engined Aston Martin featured the company’s iconic front grille and a mid-mounted V12 engine that produced 800 horsepower (597 Kilowatts).
Submitting a car to be featured in Gran Turismo requires far more information just an exterior sketch. For game designers to incorporate cars into the game they require detailed engineering information including CAD files, engine dyno information, along with every conceivable numeric metric used to describe a car. This meant that Aston Martin had to devote legitimate engineering resources to the design and execution of the DP-100 for the Gran Turismo game.
After releasing the DP-100 for Gran Turismo inquiries began to pour into Aston Martin with excited customers who wanted to purchase a mid-engine Aston Martin DP100. This customer interest led Marek Reichman to create a model which was featured by Aston Martin at the 2014 Pebble Beach meeting.
From there, customer interest led to the creation of the Aston Martin Valkyrie, which debuted as a concept in 2016. This was followed by the track-only Aston Martin Valhalla in 2019 and finally, the reinvention of the Aston Martin Vanquish grand tourer as a mid-engine V6-powered Ferrari fighter. All of these concepts that will soon reach full-scale production have the Aston Martin DP-100 for Gran Turismo, which helped kick start these projects into life.
