The Swedest Thing

Cyan Racing joins the restomod craze with a carbon-fiber Volvo P1800.

- Elana Scherr

What to do in a long, cold Swedish winter after the glow of winning the 2017 FIA World Touring Car Cup championship has worn off but before the next season starts? Some might dog-sled under the northern lights or plot that year's Gävle Goat arson, but the Cyan Racing team in Mölndal, Sweden, had a different plan for offseason entertainment: rewriting history. What if the classic Volvo P1800 had the performance to match its design? The folks at Cyan (formerly Polestar Performance before Volvo bought the name) were just the ones to take on the task of making a P1800 as fast as it is pretty. The work took more than three years, but Cyan eventually introduced its finished product amid a pandemic. Now the P1800 Cyan has finally made it to the States. So we took it to our desert proving grounds to get the numbers. Skål!

HOW IT'S MADE

Volvo built the original P1800 from 1961 through 1973, with few cosmetic changes during its run. Any year of the classic coupe can form the basis of Cyan's P1800. "Because so little of the original car is used, we can start out with a donor car beyond what would normally be seen as restorable," says Hans Bååth, Cyan Racing general manager.

Cyan strips and sandblasts the donor car, then replaces all exterior body panels with carbon fiber. Only a small portion of the original's chassis and transmission tunnel remains. The final product weighs 2424 pounds (a new P1800S weighed about 2320 pounds), with only 47.8 percent of that mass on its front axle perfect for drifting in Gothenburg or, as we did, going on a brisk 200-mile journey over the California mountains in search of Swedish pancakes.