Pocket Rocket

VW Motorsport Has Turned A Compact Sedan Into A Ferocious Racecar

- Agasti Kaulgi

A few years back, VW had organised a race at the BIC for the media fraternity with their race car, the Polo Cup car. Representing TopGear was yours truly. It was the first race that I would be a part of and the first ever race car that I’d pilot ever in my life. How hard could it be? It was just a Polo, how different could it be from the Polo that we’ve been driving for years now? Well, the answer to those questions is one word: very. It was far from behaving like the road-legal Polo, much more violent and cruel that I’d imagined it would be. Raw and unapologetic in every respect.

It didn’t have ABS and it would try and face the wrong direction every time the wheels locked after braking hard before a corner. And the lift-off over steer was something I’d never ever imagined in the wildest of my dreams. The results of that race weekend were rather dramatic for me – the Polo Cup car was a little too wild for me to tame and I ended up in the barricades in qualifying itself. The weekend was over for me even before the race.

Just like me, it was VW India’s maiden attempt at making a race car and putting together a one-make racing series. The car was raw and it had no safety nets of any sort; you’d end up in the barricades or spin out with the slightest of mistakes. It had a diesel engine from the production model, of course, tuned to suit the racetrack, and five-speed manual gearbox. VW Motorsport used it for two years before shifting to a petrol TSI motor mated to a dual-clutch race-tuned gearbox.