Volvo already planning road-going V8 Supercar?

Sat, 15 Mar 2014

After decades of cat-and-mouse battle waged between Holden and Ford, Australia's V8 Supercars series has expanded considerably. Mercedes and Nissan both joined the grid last season, and Volvo has followed suit this year. So when 2014 championship kicked off earlier this month in Adelaide, everyone was watching to see who would come out on top.

The answer is Holden, which took first place in all three of the weekend's races. In fact the General Motors division locked out the podium in the first and third races and took first and third places in the second race, letting just one other manufacturer onto the podium the entire weekend – and that was Volvo. The Polestar S60 scored second place on its first race weekend, beating all the Nissan Altimas, the Mercedes E63 AMGs, the Ford Falcons and most of the Holden Commodores.

Now that's hardly winning the championship, but it's a very solid debut. And that point was not lost on the people back at headquarters in Sweden, who are already thinking about making a roadgoing version of the race-spec V8 Supercar.

Speaking with Aussie car site Motoring.com.au, Volvo R&D chief Peter Mertens hinted that such a project is being developed, although it likely wouldn't be based on the current S60. Instead it would have to wait on the next-gen model that will share its Scalable Product Architecture with the upcoming new XC90. That could take some time, but we're sure that the engineers at Polestar aren't wasting any time getting it ready. In the meantime the S60 Polestar with its 345-horsepower turbo six will just have to suffice.

By Noah Joseph