► VW Polo GTI R5
► New Group R5 rally car
► Coming in 2018 for privateer teams
Volkswagen is returning to the World Rally Championship! Well, sort of… VW’s latest rally car has been revealed and will be made available for pro teams and racing novices alike.
Called the VW Polo GTI R5, Wolfsburg’s motorsport division’s new creation will sit alongside the Golf GTI TCR, and will be ‘the GTI for rallying.’ Underneath is an R5 regulation four-pot turbo producing 268bhp sent through a five-speed sequential ‘box to all four wheels.
The R5 is still to be homologated, but weighs just 1320kg and accelerates to 4.1 seconds.
VW hopes that the new Polo GTI R5 will carry the torch of VW’s recent rallying heritage with the Polo R rally car. In fact, the new R5 has been developed with experience from François-Xavier Demaison – VW Motorsport’s technical director who also developed the four-time WRC championship winning R WRC.
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Sven Smeets, Volkswagen Motorsport’s head honcho, said: ‘With the Polo GTI R5 we are hoping to transfer our expertise from four WRC titles to customer racing successfully, and offer a first-class racing machine for countless rally championships.’
The new Polo GTI R5 will go on sale in autumn half of 2018.
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