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This 521bhp Concept Is A PoleStar We Always Wanted – 03 Cyan Concept

There are some brilliant sports saloons on the market right now. The M5 is incredible, as is the Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio. Even Kia has built a brilliant car in the form of the Stinger. But now there’s one more to add to the mix. It’s by a company called Lynk & Co. and owned by the Canadian company Geely. It has 521bhp and it’s competing in the FIA World Touring Car Cup later this year – something that it has quite a lot of experience in, in fact. Why? Because this car is built by Cyan racing, formerly known as Polestar.

For a long time, Polestar has had Volvo’s racing at heart. It was then turned around with the focus on all-electric vehicles and hybrids. So they have plenty of experience with interesting and fast saloons. All of this talent has been shoved into the 03 Cyan Concept, which you can see in the video above.

Parts have been taken from the Lynk & Co. 3, which itself borrows a lot from Volvo, to make this concept, but this certainly isn’t a standard Volvo. It has Ohlins adjustable dampers, a wider track, plenty of aggressive aero tweaks, and 285-width tyres. Six-pot callipers await their use at the front of the vehicle and twos at the back, and that’s very handy because it pushes plenty of power from a simple 2.0-litre turbocharged inline-four engine.

521bhp is the magic number. It gets pushed through a fully sequential gearbox and a mechanical LSD to the front wheels only, and will rocket the car to 62mph in just 4.4 seconds. So, not so talented in a straight line, but Cyan is saying that it will pull 1.5 lateral G in the corners. Not bad.

Now, okay, we need to remember that this is a concept and how often do concepts actually make it to the road? Well Cyan Racing’s R&D boss Henrik Fries is calling the car a “development platform for future production performance road cars based on Lynk & Co technology”. This sounds very much like they’re going to be at pushing this spec list into upcoming production models, although further hints from Thed Björk, Cyan’s development and racing driver, implies that later products won’t be as thoroughbred.

He says, “While this concept might be a bit extreme, we have learned that in order to explore the true characteristics of a car you need to push it to its maximum and that is just what we are doing right now with this car.”

I’m very excited to see where this takes the ‘new’ company. In a market that’s not short on talent, it’s going to be very difficult to find success, but I’d like to think Lynk & Co. know exactly what they’re doing.

Alex Harrington

Alex started racing at a young age so certainly knows his way around a car and a track. He can just about put a sentence together too, which helps. He has a great interest in the latest models, but would throw all of his money at a rusty old French classic and a 300ZX. Contact: [email protected]

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