Aston Martin has been tightlipped about the Valkyrie’s extraordinary powerplant, but now, the carmaker has revealed some tidbits about this Cosworth-developed V12 engine.

Calling it the “ultimate expression of the internal combustion engine,” this normally-aspirated 6.5-liter 65-degree V12 produces 153.8 horsepower per liter of displacement or 1,000 horsepower. Aside from this mind-blowing four-digit power figure, this V12 motor revs at a sky high 11,100 rpm—unprecedented for an emissions-compliant road car. Aston Martin says this power figure will be further boosted by a battery-hybrid system too.

Furthermore, Aston Martin says that the engine is fully integral to the Valkyrie. It’s a fully-stressed element of the car (remove the engine and there’s nothing joining the front wheels to the back) and for that, they’ve avoided the use of “extreme material alloys” which are unproven over the long-term. Yet, they’ve managed to keep the weight down—206 kilograms. By comparison, Cosworth’s 3.0-liter V10 F1 engine weighs 97 kilograms. If the racing engine were scaled up to 6.5-liters, the weight would be around 210 kilograms.

One of the best examples of the painstaking optimization involved is the billet machined crankshaft. Starting life as a solid steel bar 170mm diameter and 775mm long, it is first roughed out, then heat treated, finish machined, heat treated again, gear ground, final ground and superfinished. Upon completion 80 percent of the original bar has been machined away and some six months have passed, but the end product is a crankshaft that’s an astonishing 50 per cent lighter than that used in the Aston Martin One-77’s V12—itself a Cosworth-developed evolution of Aston Martin’s series production V12 and, for a time, the world’s most powerful naturally aspirated road car engine.

Evoking the spine-tingling, ultra-high-revving F1 engines of the 1990s, but benefitting from two decades of progress in design, material, and manufacturing expertise, the Aston Martin Valkyrie’s 1000-horsepower V12 is a masterpiece, from one of the world’s most illustrious engine builders: an internal combustion engine without peer for a hypercar without precedent.