Kick comes with a click

That’s the thing with car designers. They often disagree with engineers: Should a component follow function or form? Polestar boss Thomas Ingenlath (58) started his career as a designer, so in discussions like these the decision should be clear at Volvo’s electric subsidiary. Not even close. “He challenged us to make something special from his Polestar 2,” says chassis expert Joakim Rydholm. Build your boss’ company car, that was the order.

With Ingenlath’s 476 hp (350 kW) Polestar 2, the problem wasn’t performance, but the agility of the 2.1-tonne electric vehicle. To improve steering behavior, Rydholm’s team screwed a strut bar to the front end, fitted special shock absorbers and Akebono brakes on the axles. Ingenlath’s car, nicknamed “The Beast”, raced on the track at the 2020 Goodwood Festival of Speed. The idea of ​​a powered series model was born. As Ingenlath wanted his company car back – and he still drives it today – another prototype was built a year later. And now a production version based on that called the Polestar 2 BST Edition 270.

You can still screw here

The strut bar remains, the body is 25 millimeters closer to the asphalt, and the springs are 20 percent stiffer than the standard Polestar. But the x-fold adjustable shock absorbers from Swedish motorsport expert Öhlins stand out. While Polestar was still a Swedish tuning shed, Volvo put the combustion engines in motion: under the front hood – there is a gap there due to the absence of combustion engines – there are two oil tanks with adjustment screws. They have a triple action on the front and rear shock absorbers: the first click adjusts the pre-compression, the second click adjusts the forward recoil, the third click adjusts the rear recoil. Click-to-click, Rydholm chooses the regular 7-7-7 setup and sends us for a test lap at the Ascari Racetrack in the mountains of Spain’s Malaga province.

There’s enough power, but the new Polestar no longer feels as tough as it used to. He doesn’t let anything shake him, neither skewers, nor pavements, nor coming out of corners at full throttle – that’s funny. But it easily pushes it out of the curve. Click and click, Rydholm tweaks it and the car feels much lighter on the 4-4-4. Finally, in 2-2-2, Polestar 2 almost spins on the racetrack. It’s hard to believe how few turns of a screw make it into a completely different car.

Impressive and exhausted

The remaining comfort remains even at the narrowest setting, but of course you can feel the heaviness of the car and no clicks will change anything about the slightly unstable steering wheel. In any case, it’s a lot of fun manually adjusting the swivel screws and getting the perfect setting. Without a rude awakening when it comes to consumption: Polestar craves electricity on slopes, but on country roads only two-tenths of its factory consumption of 20.2 kWh/100 km remained above kilowatt-hours (kWh). The battery would discharge after 462 kilometers on the standard cycle. Until then, at the latest, some owners will want the charging capacity set to just 155 kilowatts (kW).

In any case, the Polestar 2 BST Edition 270 shows that racetrack suitability is also possible with a two-ton vehicle. The bad news: Despite the price starting at CHF 76,900 in Switzerland, 270 copies have long been sold worldwide. However, Polestar has already announced that there will be more special models of this type.