Monstrous new 1064bhp Aston Martin Valhalla rated

And so to it. The doors swing out and forward, making it easy to drop into the fixed-back seats. You sit low, facing a low scuttle - allowed by pushrods operating the horizontally mounted spring and damper units that you can see just ahead of the windscreen. If sited vertically, they would have to have been mounted to the wheel hubs above the driveshafts so would have protruded too high to allow such a low driving position. As it is, visibility is good, through a broad windscreen and with clearly visible wheel arches to help place the car.

Being so letterboxy and low and with a high-set foot position, it imparts a racy feel. Ergonomics are generally fine. I'd like a rounder steering wheel and there are fewer hard switches than optimal, but this is a hardcore sports car, not a hatchback, so we shouldn't mind too much. Having so much exposed carbonfibre only enhances the racy vibe, likewise the perhaps unforgivable absence of any luggage volume - even the Testarossa and Revuelto at least have a frunk.

The carbonfibre body sweeps around to the rear, where there is a very large and very obvious rear wing. An active front wing is hidden in the underbody. Here's where the contradictions begin. All of this technical kit is blended into a package that Aston says maintains "breathability" meaning it has more give and more compliance than you might credit in a car like this. It is a maker of grand tourers, after all.

So while those big active wings can make big downforce, Aston reduces their effect past 150mph, rejecting a tremendously high headline downforce number so that it can avoid incredibly stiff suspension to resist the aerodynamic loads. I mean, it's still making 600kg of invisible push from 150mph to its 217mph top speed, but above 150mph it bleeds off the wing effect, which means its suspension can have a lower natural frequency so remain softer and smoother-riding. I'm for this.

I'm told I won't need to use the nose lift on any of the speed bumps I encounter here in northern Spain, and I'm quite keen on that too. The Valhalla has the makings of one of the more habitable of the prototype racer-style road cars. And I think that's important in a carbonfibre-shelled car, because the material is so rigid and uncompromising when it comes to stiffness and harshness. Aston doesn't want its cars, even these ones, to feel raw; it wants its drivers to feel good, not intimidated.

There are four regular drive modes, namely EV, Sport, Sport+ and Race, and you can select your preferred suspension stiffnesses and drivetrain responses in a preset too. After a brief flirtation with EV (still quite noisy in the cabin but the mode of choice for not waking the neighbours), I try Sport on the road. It makes for a very natural-feeling blend of characteristics. Like Ferrari with the Testarossa or even Audi with the new RS5, Aston is living in the realm of complexity versus complication.

It wants a complex car to feel uncomplicated to drive, and on the road at least it has nailed it. There's a flow to the Valhalla, an evenness of response, a slickness of steering and ride and a linearity of engine/motor urge. Excitement? Sure, that too. Flat-plane engines don't produce traditional Aston V8 growls but at, say, 30mph, selecting third gear and giving it beans elicits tremendous immediate response as the turbos spool, and you hear it all. It's right behind you and the tub is carbonfibre, after all.

But really it takes a race track to get a feel for the whole caboodle and, in the conditions I found one (rather wetter than those pictured here), even then there are limits to how far around the rev band in higher gears one can go. The sound? Quite hollow; less raspy than a flat-planed Ferrari, perhaps. Not spine-tingling, but I liked it. I won't routinely use enough of it that I'm likely to trouble the 410mm front and 390mm rear brake discs to anything like their thermal limit, either.

But honestly, given that the Valhalla is a 1000bhp-plus, 1700kg-plus hypercar with by-wire throttle, by-wire braking and enough electric power alone to get one into bother, it's incredibly friendly.

Aston says that the key to it all is having fundamentally good base dynamics. It has to be a good-handling car, the engineers say, before they start to fiddle with things like torque vectoring, which they like to do only mildly via braking at the rear and more quickly and responsively by underspeeding an inside front tyre.

Because the Circuito de Navarra is very damp today, while I put the car in Race mode and gradually remove all of the driver aids, I also slacken off the dampers to allow more body movement and hopefully find a bit more grip. The Valhalla finds good corner speed even in this crummy weather. There is understeer (much more so than there would be in the dry, one imagines), but it's easily quelled by trail braking (or not being a plum with entry speed).

And as you approach grip limits, the steering weight increases nicely, you feel the chassis moving about and it rotates seemingly around its middle, then mooches easily under power into a strong, controllable slide. If the front motors are pitching in to pull the car straight again (and I suppose they are at least thinking about it), they're very discreet, letting you feel like you're the one doing all the work. The joy is that it all feels so natural in steering, brake feel, throttle response and power distribution, even though all are anything but simple. Which was, I suppose, ultimately the idea.