As much as we love a good racing livery, there’s something that just gets us about seeing a racecar wearing nothing but its bare bodywork (or maybe some distracting camouflage). Like this Volvo, for example. Neither race car nor road car, the stripped-down vehicle you see here was built strictly for developmental purposes.
Last year, the Swedish automaker and its competition partner Polestar Cyan Racing announced a full-time return to the World Touring Car Championship. They developed the Volvo S60 Polestar TC1 to compete in the series (much as it has in the Scandinavian championship) with the idea that they would fine-tune the car this year, challenge for wins the next, and hopefully for the championship the year after.
The trouble is that, while the racing cars are picking up valuable miles and data on circuits around the world, they haven’t been back home since the season started in April. So they built another one just to tinker with back at headquarters in Sweden.
Wearing neither the usual French racing blue (which Polestar has long since claimed as its own) nor the Swedish flag livery designed by Prince Carl Philip, the S60 TC1 looks even more sinister. All you can see is the carbon fiber and steel bodywork, and while it might look a little dull against a field of colorful competitors on race day, it looks pretty slick all by itself at Mantorp Park in Sweden where it’s been undergoing testing.
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