Photo: Lada Sport Rosneft

Lada looking forward to successful 2015 with the new Vesta

Lada are hopeful of a strong, third consecutive full season in the 2015 FIA World Touring Car Championship, competing with the brand new Vesta TC1 model this year, which replaces the outgoing Granta, with the team hoping to build on its two victories scored last year in China and Macau.

The Russian manufacturer has sent two cars to Argentina to take part in the first round of the Championship at Termas de Río Hondo, which will be driven by British drivers Rob Huff and James Thompson, while their team-mate Mikhail Kozlovskiy’s campaign will start one race later at Marrakech, Morocco in April.

“The new racing challenger based on the Vesta model looks really impressive and our drivers confirm its huge potential on the racing track,” said Lada president Bo Andersson.

“Just a couple of days before the track debut of the Vesta TC1, we launched a pre-production series of the street version of Vesta in Izhevsk (Russia), where mass production of this model will start in September 2015,” he added. “The Vesta is an all Russian product, conceived designed and built at our factory in Russia. As for the race car Vesta TC1, the design and majority of the engineering was done by Lada and Lada Sport, although we partly involved our long-term partner and motorsport consultants ORECA.

“They assist us with some racing components in conjunction with our designers and engineers around a Russian built Vesta chassis. ORECA is our engine supplier; their new 380bhp turbo engine was significantly improved in comparison with the unit used in the Lada Granta in 2014. Our French partners also assisted with aerodynamics, which are more efficient and now provide much higher straight line speed and better performance overall, however, the Lada Vesta racing car is a certainly ‘A Russian Endeavour’. I wish our Lada Sport Rosneft team a very successful season, and I believe we will gain more victories this year.”