Photo: Polestar Cyan Racing

Volvo could leave the STCC if they adopt TCR

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Volvo have confirmed they presently have no plans to build a TCR specification car, suggesting they would be forced to leave the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship if the series switches to TCR regulations as early as next year as has been predicted.

The STCC organisation has confirmed it plans to switch to the growing low-cost touring car formula either next year or in 2018, with interest from a number of teams and national importers as it attempts to grow back to its pre-2012 strength, but Alexander Murdzevski Schedvin, head of Polestar motorsport, Volvo’s performance brand, has stated categorically that Volvo will not be producing a TCR car in the near future.

“We will not do TCR, absolutely not,” said Murdzevski Schedvin to TouringCarTimes. “If you want to do TCR you can’t really do it with (just) your left hand, to be just about good enough to produce cars for Sweden, because you have other competitors in the championship that have customer racing factory programmes.

“You have to be the one who spends the most to produce a quick car in the championship, regardless if you’re going to use it in Sweden, the UK or the TCR series…we don’t see we’ll invest heavily into that, especially as we’d have to use a model that’s going out of production in 18 months’ time (the V40), so no chance.”

When asked does that mean Volvo would leave the STCC if the championship switched to TCR, Murdzevski Schedvin responded: “That’s correct, we won’t continue then.”

The Polestar boss then added that other options were to either balance the Solution F and TCR cars, or delay the introduction of TCR until a time when Volvo could be able to compete.

“If you want to keep a manufacturer in the championship, or if we really want to stay, you would have to do some sort of balance of performance or postpone the introduction of TCR,” he added.

“A lot of national championships make the same mistake,” continued Murdzevski. “They say if only we get new cars everything will be fine again and we’ll get big numbers of competitors, but you can’t run a car cheaper anywhere in Europe than you can run this (Solution F) regulation, and if teams have difficulty in funding that, and then add car investment all top, (they think) all these importers are going to come running and supporting; well they’re not running now and they didn’t run when we were using S2000 previously either.”