RIGHT NOW, VOLVO is muesli. Volvo is contents insurance. Grown up, probably a good idea, but fundamentally quite a bit dull.
It wasn't always this way. Volvo went daft, once upon time. The 850 racer - the cuboid wagon that spent a couple of seasons causing block-arsed carnage in the British Touring Car Championship in the mid-90's (see sidebar) ---- was an object study in Scandinavian silliness.As was the road it spawned: the 250hp, torque-steering 850 R. But since then, under Ford's ownership, everything's gone a bit muesli. Sure, there have been warm Volvo's but never anything you could classify as fruity. Even the 225hp 'T5' C30 is a quickish GT rather than a real track-burning hot hatch.
Until now. Volvo is out of Ford's hands, and berserk is back. This is Polestar's C30, a 400hp Volvo's Swedish Touring Car Team. It is the spiritual successor of the 850 R and the most exciting thing to emerge from Sweden since Victoria Silvstedt.
It looks evil. Those 'eyebrows' running over the front wheels inspired by the arches on Polestar's race car, as are the black winglets flanking the front air dam and the double-deck rear wing. The Polestar concept sits lower to the road than the stock C30, with Viagra-spec Ohlins springs and dampers. There's your hint: This isn't some pretty show concept. This is a functioning, shockingly fast hot hatch. We know, because we're driven it.
Before hauling the C30 into downtown Gothenburg and past hordes of upsettingly beautiful humans. Top Gear took it out for a few laps around Volvo's twisty proving ground on the west coast of Sweden. Far from feeling like a shonky development mule, the Polestar C30 is a hugely sorted car: well put-together, easy to drive, fast, and more than a rival for the similarly powered, similarly four-wheel-drive Subaru Impreza Cosworth or Mitsubishi Evo FQ400. A genuine super hatch, in other words. But still a Volvo.
A blinking-quick Volvo. On the run, the C30 feels considerably more urgent than the Cossie Impreza, no mean feat. There's barely any turbo lag and a screaming, half-an-F1-car soundtrack, a splitting metallic wail that permeates the cabin and buzzes your brain into a happy soup of adrenal goo. Add in a generous sprinkling of genuine digestion-altering pace and that's a Top Gear recipe.
The Polestar concept uses the same 2.5-liter five-pot turbo as the T5 C30--and, in slightly revised form, the Ford Focus RS-----but with tougher pistons, conrods and a new turbo-charger to achieve that 400hp figure. With a curb weight of 1,420kg, that means a power weight ratio of 281hp per ton, better than the Audi RS5 or the Merc C63 AMG.
It has recorded a 0-100kph time of 4.6secs,but Polestar boss Christian Dahl admits that was a conservative run. He reckons a full-bore test would see it to go to four seconds flat. We wouldn't be surprised: Our test run, followed by a passenger ride with Swedish Touring Car Championship ace Robert Dahlgren, proved the C30's acceleration and grip levels to be verging on Nissan GT-R Territory.
The Polestar's four-wheel-drive system has been nicked from the Volvo XC60, but toughened up with a new center differential to throw more power to the rear wheels. This is no tail-happy drift monster, but you can coax it into silliness by stamping on the brakes mid-corner then flooring the accelerator. Drive like an arse, in other words, and it'll get a bit crossed up, but never truly scary.
That's the smartest thing about the Polestar.Yes, it's mad-quick, but it still feels thoroughly Volvo-ish and unbreakable-----everything is appropriately solid and well-built: the clutch light and easy, the brakes progressive. It is, in short one of the most entertaining cars we've driven in years: proper fun without ever feeling like it wants to see you dead. Which on balance, is pretty much what you want from Swedish hot hatch.
So, will it reach production? In this extreme, supercar-humbling form, sadly not. Currently, Polestar's offerings are limited to an array of ECU upgrades available through Volvo dealerships. This C30 has been created as a test bed for ambitions----a showcase of what the Swedes could do if given the chance by Volvo. Company boss Christian Dahl says he wants Polestar to become the Volvo equivalent of RenaulSport. That would make it something like VolvoSport, presumably.
An admirable aim, but perhaps an realistic one. Foisting a "hot" sub-brand on a marque as conservative as Volvo is like pitching a budget line of Bentleys. Will anyone wandering into a Volvo dealership be on the lookout for a 400hp hatch? Dahl says the concept has cost over P7 million to put together, and reckons Polestar would have charge some P3 million per production car to break even: in the same league as the hottest Evo and Impreza, but unlikely to lure potential buyers of either.
Furthermore,where RenaultSport has a handful of small cars to work its delicious brand of Gallic magic on, beyond the C30, Polestar would have to look upward, to the V40 or the S60. Hot versions of those throw Volvo decisively into Big Boy's Territory, ground occupied by BMW's M Division and Mercedes-Benz's AMG, players that certainty won't tolerate an upstart Swede on their patch.
But the C30 shows that Polestar has heady objectives, and Volvo's UK management seems very nearly as excited about the Polestar as we are. If they decided there was a market for, say, a 270hp all-wheel-drive C30 to rival the Volkswagen Golf R and the Audi S3, Polestar would have the production line running before you could regurgitate a mouthful of sursromming..
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