Volkswagen ready to unleash R5 weapon
Volkswagen’s return to the World Rally Championship remains on course for the second half of next season, with its Polo GTI R5.
The firm has issued an impression of what the car will look like when it is unveiled later this year. Development of the car began in January and testing should begin soon.
There’s significant expectation for the Polo GTI R5 given the success of its Volkswagen’s Polo R WRC, which dominated the sport from 2013-2016. The Hannover team has utilised the experience from the World Rally Car programme with Sebastien Ogier’s rally engineer Gerard- Jan de Jongh working as senior project engineer and technical director Francois-xavier Demaison taking overall responsibility for the R5 car.
VW Motorsport director Sven Smeets said: “With the Polo GTI R5 we are hoping to transfer our expertise from four WRC titles to customer racing, and offer a first-class racing machine for championships from national series to the WRC. Before the first outing next year, we will subject the R5 to rigorous testing.”
Volkswagen has already confirmed it won’t be running a factory team in the same style as Volkswagen Group stablemates Skoda.