Volvo Considers Adding S60s

The prospect of more than two Volvo S60s racing in the V8 Supercars Championship is already being considered, but won’t happen until 2015 at the earliest.

The Chinese-owned Swedish brand will launch into the V8 Supercars Championship in 2014 in combination with its global motorsport partner Polestar Racing and Melbourne team Garry Rogers Motorsport. 

Rebranded as Volvo Polestar Racing, the team will field S60s for Scott McLaughlin and a second yet to be confirmed driver. The chassis are being designed and built at GRM, while the 5.0-litre version of Volvo’s B8444S engine is being developed by Polestar in Sweden.

Both Volvo’s global motorsport boss Derek Crabb and Polestar owner Christian Dahl have told v8supercars.com.au that more S60s on the grid would be preferable.

“It appeals to me,” said Crabb. “Clearly, the more cars on the grid the more exposure Volvo gets and the more chances Volvo has of getting a win, which we need.

“But then you have to put the cost back into it. So yeah, we dream about year two and year three but let’s get through year one first.”

Added Dahl: “I think if you are going to fight for the championship in the long term you need more cars out there because there are a lot of Holdens and only two Volvo. 

“But that is a question for the future.”

If the car count stays otherwise unchanged, there will be 13 Holden Commodores, six Ford Falcons, four Nissan Altimas, three Mercedes-Benz E63 AMGs and two Volvo S60s on the 2014 grid.

Volvo will be the first marque contesting the Championship not offering a V8 engine in its production car lineup. The Nissan Altima road car does not come with a V8 engine, but the Japanese manufacturer offers V8s in other models including the Patrol SUV sold in Australia. 

Volvo is committed to a four and three-cylinder turbo strategy for its production cars dubbed VEA. Crabb, who doubles as the company’s powertrain engineering chief, has been quoted in 2013 describing V8 engines as dinosaurs.

But while not resiling from that comment at all when it comes to road cars, Crabb said a V8 Supercars S60 makes good sense.

“In essence we are talking about a race engine here,” the Englishman said. “We want to present the S60 and to compete in this series you need to have a V8 engine. It’s as straight as that.

“If you come to Europe you’ve got to have corporate average 75 grams (CO2 emissions) by 2025. All manufacturers are going to have to downsize for that and that’s the reality. So I am looking at 10 to 15 years away. Here we are looking for a race engine for tomorrow…”

Crabb said the proposal from Volvo Cars Australia to go V8 Supercars racing had taken a while to win him over and then it had taken a while for him to win the company’s global board over.

He said it made sense because Volvo already had strong S60 racing programs in Europe and the USA but was weak in Australia and Asia.

The increasing importance of Polestar as a performance road car brand as well as a racing partner was also significant. Australia is the first market in the world where the $110,000 257kW Polestar S60 production car was sold. Volvo Car Australia has sold other Polestar performance offerings as well. 

“There is a lot of stuff around racing; you can say how many more cars can you sell and that is a pretty hard one to measure. You can look at equivalent advertising value and that is also difficult,” explained Crabb.

“Or you can look at pure Polestar sales, which is cash. And if you cover the racing costs by the revenue brought in by Polestar then the extra sales, equivalent ad value all come for free. That is a much easier equation for the board members to understand.” 

Crabb said he had laid down no formal expectations with Volvo Polestar Racing about expected performance levels, but he had given an indicator to his own bosses. 

“When we go to board level we say we are expecting this or that, but the responsibility rests me. We never push it down to team level.”