Volvo S60 Polestar 2013 Review - International

What we liked:
>> Fabulously organised chassis
>> Strong, flexible engine
>>Undemanding driver engagement

Not so much:
>> Gearbox very limited
>> Needs shift paddles
>> Engineering outstrips interior

OVERVIEW
>> Volvo needs to overhaul its image to stay relevant. Cue the S60 Polestar
Straight-six engines aren’t that hard to get right. All manner of companies have made V6s that didn’t deliver smoothness or mid-range strength, but it’s much harder to put your finger on unsuccessful in-line sixes.

The reason they’re not more popular is simply packaging and, unusually, Volvo sits its inline six directly across the engine bay, rather than aping BMW and Ford in running the engine lengthways along the car.

This, though, has left them some issues they’ve never really resolved. Until now.

Polestar is the privately owned team that runs Volvo’s factory touring car team in the Swedish championship and it’s to Polestar that Volvo Australia turned to make the S60 sedan a sports sedan.

The result is a faster, stronger, more comfortable and more athletic sub-five-second machine that hits 250km/h, runs heavy-duty sports suspension and still carries a full Volvo warranty.

It’s a completely re-engineered S60 with changes to basically everything bar the stamped panels and the interior. The engine has been fiddled with for more power, the gearbox has been fiddled with for faster shifting, the all-wheel drive has been fiddled with to make it feel more rear-drive, the exhaust has been fiddled with to make it louder and richer.

That’s a lot of fiddling, but it’s not half of it.

There has been a lot more tweaking of the suspension architecture than anything else, including everything from a carbon-fibre strut brace under the bonnet to big-buck Ohlins dampers all round.

This car will be in Australia in late June and it’s a critical machine. Volvo Australia might have ordered just 50 of them from Polestar, but that’s the lead in for the entire world. If this thing takes off, then Polestar has promised Volvo Australia it will get the first chop at the next Polestar model.

It’s based around the Polestar-modified S60 T6 priced around $82,000, so what would you get for your extra $40,000 or, put another way, 50 per cent more money?

Looking around the inside of the cabin, you’d have to suggest that you don’t get very much. There are parts of the car that have been tweaked inside, but there aren’t many and the tweaks aren’t big.

There is a Polestar logo on the gear lever now and a limited-edition number (out of 200, oddly enough) on the steering wheel. There are also Polestar logos on the sills, though the writing in the blue box of the Polestar logo is so small that all you can read is “Engineered by”.

The S60 Polestar carries all of Volvo’s standard gear, including the radar cruise control, sat-nav, multiple safety features both mechanical and electronic, and leather everywhere.

No, you pay for what you can’t see, and what you can’t see is very convincing.

There are changes to the engine, which gets a combination of Polestar’s own software management system that piggybacks the Volvo unit, plus gets a larger Borg Warner twin-scroll turbocharger with up to 1.2 bar of boost.

There is a new, larger intercooler and on the back of it all is a 2.5-inch full-flow cat-back exhaust system that grows into a pair of 3.5-inch tail pipes.

That gives the Polestar 257kW of power and more than 500Nm of torque – though how much more than 500Nm nobody is saying.

That’s a lot of power from a 3.0-litre in-line six, especially in a chassis architecture that’s designed around behaving nicely as a four- or five-cylinder front-wheel drive with the engine sitting across the engine bay.

The limiting factor in the car’s power number is the transmission, not the engine or the chassis.

Part of the problem is the space limitation created by turning the six-cylinder sideways, even if it is known as the “short six” engine inside Volvo. The space needed to accommodate six pistons and a block around them leaves it a bit light on for room to accommodate anything you might fancy bolting on to it, like, say, a transmission.

Polestar and Volvo have cast around for stronger transmission units with more gears or even dual-clutch mechanicals, but there are none to be had for this layout at these volumes. That’s why it sticks with an uprated version of the S60’s AWF21 six-speed auto and it’s a forced decision that hamstrings the car in many ways.

One of those ways is that the engine could otherwise produce a lot more power – as its 500-plus horsepower concept car from last year demonstrated. As it is, it has the same claimed NEDC fuel economy and emissions as the standard car, but not the 300-350kW it could have had.

It’s also all-wheel drive, via a revised Haldex V system, and the whole thing includes a launch control system. As part of that, the transmission has had its software tweaked for faster shifts, while the Haldex system has been modified to feel more rear-drive biased, especially in Sport with the skid-control system turned off.

“Off” for Volvo is only partly off, but Polestar uses this as a switch to make the S60 act as a rear-driver, only sending drive to the front wheels when the rear-end runs out of longitudinal grip.

Perhaps because it knew its transmission wouldn’t let it crank out the enormous horsepower numbers that have become the norm with performance cars these days, most of Polestar’s work has been done underneath the car.

One of the keys was fitting a carbon-fibre strut brace between the front struts to stiffen up the front-end and make the steering response more accurate, but don’t think for a second that it’s a collection of bolt-on bits. It has been thoroughly tested in more than 10 countries.

The top mounts for the dampers have been upgraded at the front and the rear, there are new rear tie blades, new toe link arms at the back-end, 80 per cent stiffer springs and the anti-roll bars are larger at both ends, too.

The investment in suspension technology alone has been enormous, with Swedish damping company Öhlins developing a new system for the car.

Complete with 20 ‘clicks’ of adjustment that allows drivers to scroll through a variety of pre-ordained bump and rebound combinations, the dampers promise to transform the S60’s behaviour.

With more than 80 individual parts, the front dampers are probably over-engineered for the job and include valves that cater for changes in temperature and an internal “blow off” valve to cope with sharp bump hits when the suspension is already loaded.

Volvo Cars Australia is still weighing up what it will use to anchor all of this. The options we drove included Volvo’s own top-level sports caliper and 336mm x 29mm front discs fitted with Jurid 958 performance brake pads or larger, stronger 302mm x 22mm discs with HP2000 Brembo brake pads and four-piston fixed calipers in an alloy monobloc.

Whatever it chooses will sit inside a set of new 19-inch rims and super-sticky Michelin Pilot Super Sport 235/40 R19 tyres. Forget uprating it to bigger 20-inch wheels and tyres, because they won’t fit.

And it’s 1684kg all up – exactly the same as the stock car.

When you’re hand-braked for power by your own gearbox, that’s the only realistic position Volvo can take with the S60 Polestar, but it also happens to be accurate.

The engine tweaks have made the S60 Polestar a strong performer, but not quite a rocket. At least, it’s not quite a rocket by AMG/M/quattro standards.

Don’t believe that it’s slow, because it’s not. Activate the launch control and you find a car that just, well, works.

It rocks back under throttle, cranks its drive down the back and just launches. Even on dirt. It wastes nothing, doesn’t dip in the revs and just goes.

There may be criticisms that the engine note could be a touch more uproarious, but without a bypass valve it’s already walking a fine line between loud and comfortable and sonorous and droning on a constant throttle.

The six is a sweet thing, spinning freely to its 6500rpm redline and feeling like it could easily handle another 1000 revs. And it sounds good; deep and rich and there is barely a vibration out of place from it. It’s good work, given the compromises it’s coping with.

Yet the chief of its compromises comes in for greater criticisms. The car could cope with a louder exhaust if only it had another overdriven gear (or two) to cruise with, which would solve two problems in one hit. It would also drop its fuel consumption.

Then there are some more practical issues for performance driving. To get it into manual mode, you have to push the lever across to the left, where you find a sequential gate that goes the wrong way (forward for an upshift, back for a downshift). For true performance driving, that’s just untenable.

That would be largely overcome with gearshift paddles, but the S60 Polestar doesn’t have them. Yet. It almost certainly will, but not initially. The shift pattern is more frustrating on a track than it is on the road, but it’s still annoying.

But that’s largely the end of the driving criticisms because everything that has been done beneath the S60 Polestar j-u-s-t w-o-r-k-s.

There are very few cars this heavy that feel this light. There are even fewer cars with 61 per cent of their mass over the front-end that feel this rear-biased on the road. There are fewer cars still, of any four-door body style, with this much turn-in bite.

If you bravely point the S60 Polestar at a corner -- any corner -- at speed, you will find that you’ve severely underestimated its enthusiasm for the job.

The first kilometre or two in the Polestar basically involve it giving you a lesson in flat cornering, steering bite and encouraging engagement.

Tight corners don’t frighten it. Fast corners don’t frighten it. Tightening radius corners don’t frighten it. Direction changes don’t frighten it. It’s just plain good.

Your first shock comes as soon as you fiddle the wheel for the first direction change of any kind, even in a straight line. The car bites and responds and the feel through the steering wheel just gives you confidence. It’s clean and crisp.

Then you push a bit harder in a few corners and you find that this is easily the most coherent fast Volvo in history. Sure, that’s damning with faint praise, but that’s the easiest way to say it. Yet it goes further than that.

There’s a cleanliness and a lightness and an enthusiasm to the S60 Polestar’s handling package that should (probably won’t, but should) make quick BMW and Benz drivers think twice.

There is a balance that makes you, later, reopen the bonnet just to make sure they haven’t moved the engine. There’s a progressiveness to its handling as you approach the end of the grip, too. It carries ludicrous amounts of mid-corner speed and the whole thing is just so accurate and, well, fun.

The V60 Polestar has a combination of being light enough on its feet to be charming and enjoyable, yet utterly planted and secure enough to leave you believing it will always back you when things get tricky.

That is all backed up by a tremendous brake package, even with its standard package underneath. The stock brakes are powerful, adjustable and have good response -- and they just don’t seem to fade, even on the track.

The Brembo package is phenomenal, but they pay a price in a groaning moan as you get deep into the pedal. That is a problem Polestar is aware of and it’s working on it.

Aside from the transmission, the biggest issue Volvo will have for the S60 Polestar is that the sheer quality of everything they’ve done beneath the car means it far outstrips the standard Volvo interior pieces that have been largely left alone.

The interior plastics and trims, for example, aren’t exactly in keeping with the hand-built quality of the dampers. Then there’s the fiddly multi-media system and its tiny screen, plus the demand that you go through two layers of twirl and push before you can turn the skid control off.

Is it really worth 40-50 per cent more than the best of the current S60 range? That’ll be up to 50 people to decide, but you could probably argue that above the luxury tax, Volvo’s not getting all of that.

And besides, it’s probably a 50 per cent better car…

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