Gothenburg Sweden - As is the case with so many tuning houses, Christian Dahl started off building modified versions of standard road cars for his own racing team.
Since Dahl is Swedish, the cars were Volvos and the team was called Polestar. Before long it came to the notice of the suits at Volvo; Dahl's been getting technical help from the factory with the race cars since 1996 and in recent years he's been developing high-performance road cars for production, using the Polestar name as Mercedes-Benz uses AMG and Renault does Gordini.
Now Volvo has bought out Dahl's entire operation and will be using Polestar as the model name for special high performance Volvos, while the workshop staff, who will now be working for Volvo, concentrate on using the company's 'twin engine' hybrid plug-in technology as a basis for the next generation of hot Volvos.
SPREADING THE GOOD VIBES
Volvo president Hakan Samuelsson explained: "We want to bring the Polestar experience to more Volvo drivers by putting the full resources of the factory behind its development as the model name for our high performance cars."
He expects to sell about 750 Polestar versions of the V60 station wagon and S60 sedan a year, rising to between 1000 and 1500 annually in the next few years, as well as selling aftermarket go-fast accessories for existing cars under the Polestar name at Volvo dealerships.
And Dahl? He's not sorry; he's going to rename the racing team and go back to doing what he loves - developing and racing Volvos.