Bad news coming out of Sweden: Alain Visser, Volvo’s director of marketing, tells Swedish financial newspaper Dagens Industri that the automaker will pull out of Swedish Touring Car competition as soon as contractually possible.
Visser told Dagens Industri that motorsport “does not conform with our brand, where we stand for smaller engines and safety.” Polestar Racing, which runs Volvo’s STCC and Australian V8 Supercars racing teams, characterized its partnership with Volvo as “currently being evolved.”
“We are going to continue racing in the 2015 STCC and V8 Supercars,” a Polestar spokesperson told TouringCarTimes, noting the STCC and V8 Supercars contracts run out in 2015 and 2016 respectively. “We are going to evaluate our participation after that, as we [. . .] have done a number of times in the past,” the spokesperson said.
Volvo has been shaking up the way it does business lately, including this week’s decision to sit out nearly all of 2015’s auto shows. The Chinese-owned carmaker will only appear at the major auto shows in Detroit, Geneva, and Beijing next year, choosing instead to focus its efforts (and money) on developing its online presence.
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There may be a glimmer of hope in the fact that Polestar’s decision doesn’t seem to be final, and given that it acts as a partner of Volvo’s rather than an arm of the automaker itself, it’s possible that the racing group could still participate in motorsports past 2016.
What would a world without Volvo racing efforts look like? We hoped we’d never find out.
This story originally appeared on roadandtrack.com via WorldCarFans.
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via Agya
