Polestar is the official Volvo Cars performance company and brand, based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Until 2015, Polestar Performance was a division of Polestar along with the Polestar racing team and prototypes. Volvo Cars announced in July 2015 that it had purchased Polestar Performance.
Polestar’s history with Volvo began with the 850 in 1996, at the birth of the Swedish Touring Car Championship. Since then Polestar have raced with the S40, S60, C30 and the current generation S60. Today, Polestar is Volvo’s Performance Brand.
Polestar was appointed official performance partner in 2009, when the Polestar Performance Optimisation for Volvo road cars was introduced. The next step was taken in 2010, when Polestar completed the Volvo C30 Polestar Concept car, a hint at what was to come in 2013, when the first production car from Polestar together with Volvo was introduced: the Volvo S60 and V60 Polestar.
A racing car engine is by definition a fine tuned instrument built to perform on the borderline of failure. After almost two decades of pushing Volvo cars to their limits on the race track, Polestar now knows quite a lot about how to build fast and efficient Volvo engine.
Polestar engineers have built bio-ethanol engines for the S2000 regulation as well as the 4-cylinder, 1.6-liter turbo for WTCC and the naturally aspirated V8 for the V8 Supercars in Australia.
