When Aston Martin Decided Real Life Wasn’t Enough – And Built a Toy That Costs as Much as a Maserati

There are expensive things. Then there are very expensive things. And then there’s Aston Martin’s new racing simulator — a contraption so ludicrously priced that, for the same money, you could simply buy a proper sports car and drive to somewhere that smells like petrol, scorched rubber, and an impending midlife crisis.

What we’re talking about here is the latest and flashiest evolution of the AMR-C01 from 2020. Now reborn with a new suffix: R, which, clearly, stands for Ridiculously Expensive. Built in collaboration with Curv Racing Simulators, this beast resembles a carbon-fibre spaceship — a monocoque cockpit that looks suspiciously like someone welded a PlayStation onto the nose of an Aston Martin Valkyrie.

Inside? Only the most outrageously powerful tech known to mankind. An Intel Raptor Lake processor. 32 gigabytes of DDR5 RAM. Two terabytes of SSD storage. And an Nvidia RTX 5090 – a graphics card so bleeding-edge that NASA probably has a waiting list for it. All of it is piped into a 49-inch curved Samsung display with HDR10+ Gaming, 240Hz refresh rate, and a latency of just 1 millisecond. Which makes the previous model’s 120Hz and 4ms feel about as advanced as a fridge in a Lada.

And the theatrics don’t end there. You don’t just sit in it — you recline, Valkyrie-style, in a driving position so low and aggressive that even your spine starts questioning whether you’re about to launch into a race or a survival mission.

Price tag? £58,750 before tax. Which, coincidentally, is about what you’d pay for a Maserati Ghibli. Not that the Ghibli would necessarily start on a cold morning, but at least it would look smug in your driveway while trying. Only 50 of these simulators will be made — because if you’re building a carbon-fibre race pod with more computing power than a nuclear reactor, you’re certainly not making it for the masses.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to dig out my IKEA chair with a bolt-on steering wheel and watch my laptop start wheezing as soon as I load into Forza.