Volkswagen Team Sweden

All preparations is ready and Volkswagen Team Sweden is on their way, the 3300km trip to Montalegre, Portugal.

Part of the team pictured, just before the start of the trip to Portugal

With no more than 4 days to go before the opening round of the FIA World Rallycross Championship 2015, team manager Tommy Kristoffersson is happy with the pre-season preparations, as he describes the start of the season in his own words:

- We started a three year plan in November 2013 with the focus to build a team for the Rallycross World Championship. The plan was to develop a tailor-made Rallycross Volkswagen, designed to be a championship winning car and to build a team with the capacity to challenge for the World Championship title.

 We started a project in 2013 with a team of head hunted key persons that we considered as the most suitable for Rallycross. With a mixture of knowledge from Racing, Rally and Rallycross, the combination is what Rallycross is all about. We decided to invest in a proper design process, and spent a lot of time and money in documentation and design work before we started building the first Volkswagen Polo R WRX cars in 2014.

We used 2014 as a development year, sorting out the new Volkswagen Polo R WRX and to develop the team, running mainly national events in Sweden without any pressure of achieving top results. The plan for 2015 is to run the first full year in the World Rallycross Championship, to learn the tracks and to take next step in the development process with the goal to challenge for podium positions in the different races.  

Now the equipment is on the way to Portugal and step 2 of our 3-year plan is started. The Volkswagen Polo R WRX has been taken to the next level of development. With all the experience from 2014 in mind we implemented more than 60 changes to the 2015 MY Polo. There are no major changes, but many small improvements, that we believe can take the Polo R WRX to the next level.

With the truck leaving yesterday and the remaining crew leaving for Portugal on Wednesday, we started a 14 days trip together as the second event at Hockenheim ring is a few days after Portugal.

The entire team have really done a fantastic job to prepare ourselves in the best possible way and I am really proud of what we have achieved so far. To succeed in Rallycross you have to be best prepared combined with some luck, and I am confident in the first part of that. Everything could happen during the events, but we have done what I believe is necessary to achieve our goals. Now we are looking forward to the weekend in Portugal, and I hope to be able to run the first race without any major problems to be able to get started in a good way.

 

Volkswagen Team Sweden

Tommy Kristoffersson, Team Manager