Insight: how a Volkswagen Polo GTI becomes a rally car

“You can go to the same places [in development] and do the same tests, but you need to try to build the best car for these regulations – and that means to a cost,” says Volkswagen Motorsport boss Sven Smeets. 

“It’s not just ‘I want to do this because I know it will be good’, because that could be too expensive. The prices for a lot of parts, such as the gearbox, are fixed by the FIA, and I can confirm we were not allowed to lose money selling this car or its parts.”

The difference in the class rules, and the introduction of the new Polo GTI road car, means that virtually nothing is carried over from the World Rally Car.

“There are ideas from the World Rally Car, but it’s a new car on a new platform,” adds Smeets. “We have taken some ideas and the philosophy from the WRC, in areas like dampers and kinematics, but it’s a new car.”

That means the Polo GTI R5 is built on the VW Group’s MQB A0 small car platform. It also meant that, while the project was announced in 2016, work couldn’t start until the new Polo GTI road car’s design was completed in mid-2017.

Francois-Xavier Demaison, Volkswagen Motorsport’s technical chief, says: “We had to wait for the new road car model to get the data from the factory. We started with the CAD data from the base car: we always do, because it’s easier to get CAD than a real body when it’s a new car. Once we have the data we can start to work on the parts we need to modify or upgrade.”

Demaison said the priorities when developing the car were reliability and ease of use. “It’s a customer car, so it’s important that there aren’t too many things to do at a service,” he says. “Customers want a car that’s easy to service and to manage, and reliable – that’s always the number one priority.”

The rally car uses the platform and bodyshell from the road-going Polo, but many of the mechanical components have been adapted to meet the R5 regulations: there are fewer common parts between the two machines than between the Golf GTI and the TCR touring car version.

That means that, among other changes, the Polo GTI R5 has permanent four-wheel-drive, while the road car’s DSG gearbox is switched for a five-speed sequential unit. 

What both versions of the Polo GTI have in common is their powerplant: Volkswagen’s EA288 turbocharged engine. But while the road car uses the 2.0-litre version, the R5 rules require 1.6-litre engines, so the rally car has the smaller version, which produces 268bhp and 295lb ft. Due to the nature of rallying the Polo GTI R5 only has a top speed of around 125mph, with the engine tuned to deliver acceleration (0-62mph takes around 4.1 seconds) and response.

The EA288 1.6 engine is already used in sister firm Skoda’s Skoda Fabia R5, so Volkswagen took that unit and further developed it. “We’ve had close co-operation with Skoda,” says Smeets. “We’ve transferred from their car into ours, but in two years they will develop a new Fabia R5 from the new Fabia road car, which will be on the same [MQB A0] platform as ours. So we will transfer information in the other direction then.”

When the Volkswagen Polo WRC made its debut on the 2013 Monte Carlo Rally, Sebastien Ogier set the fastest time on its first competitive stage – and went on to claim a podium finish.