Jari Ketomaa thrashes Prodrive's new Volkswagen Golf SCRC (video)
World Rally ace Jari Ketomaa shows no mercy behind the wheel of Prodrive's new 300+bhp Golf rally car
Prodrive knows a thing or two about making rally cars. Actually, Prodrive knows a whole lot about making rally cars. Colin McRae, Richard Burns, Petter Solberg; yep, they’ve all won championships in Prodrive built Rally cars. So it’s little surprise to hear that FAW-VW, a co-owned arm of Volkswagen in China, came to Prodrive and asked them to build a rally car to enter the China Rally Championship in.
You might think that competing in a Championship thousands of miles away and with little coverage in the western world would seem a little pointless for Prodrive. But it turns out the CRC’s open-regs were just too hard for it to ignore.
Instead of having to conform to a thick booklet of rules set out by the FIA, the CRC allows competitors to enter larger, 2-litre engine’d cars with bigger, 35mm restrictors, wearing aero-kits and bodywork that would send scrutineers into a tape-measure based frenzy at a WRC event.
This enables Prodrive’s Golf SCRC to produce more than the 300bhp often found under the bonnet of full-blown WRC cars (which use smaller, 1.6-litre engines), and also means torque can be substantially higher.
The car stormed to victory at its debut event in China, confirming Prodrive’s expertise in building ultra-fast off-road machinery. But before it did, it underwent extensive testing to ensure it’d be able to handle the jumps, bumps and general battering rally cars face on stages.
The video above shows Finnish World Rally star Jari Ketomaa letting his long, blonde hair down behind the wheel of the Golf SCRC before its first competitive event. He forces the Golf to do handbrake turns, burnouts and ‘maximum attack’ cornering to illustrate its talents.
It looks bloody awesome, but what else would you expect from an engineering firm that’s won three World Rally titles? Prodrive, when can we have a go?
You can read more about Prodrive's Volkswagen Golf SCRC and our exclusive interview with its creator, Paul Eastman, in the next issue of evo (204).
