Carbon fiber restomod goes all out for performance.
- The Volvo P1800 Cyan is the car Volvo should have made 60 years ago, if we’d had carbon fiber and Helinger axles back then…
- It looks languid and lovely and you won’t see another P1800 all day.
- Only drawback is the sticker: $700,000!
What do you do after you’ve won five world championships turning Volvos into race cars? You branch out. And start making money.
“We would be lying if we said that we haven’t been inspired by Singer,” said Hans Baath, general manager, cars, for Cyan Cars. “I think Singer has sort of created something. I mean, restomods or whatever you want to call them, have been there forever, but something happened when Singer did their project.”
Yeah, what happened was people started making absurd amounts of money fixing up old sports cars!
The Singer “project,” still going, by the way, was to take regular old 911s and reimagine them in tremendous detail, rebuilding, reengineering and restoring cars that once went for less than 50 grand on the used car market and turning them into half-million-dollar-and-more pieces of wheeled art that also just happened to drive better than the original, and maybe better than almost any car ever made.
So that was certainly part of the inspiration that made Cyan Racing start redoing Volvo P1800s, and the half million bucks certainly didn’t hurt. Maybe what happened was, it turned out people would pay more than half a million dollars for a restomod. Singer did it, Gunther Werks did it, LA Workshop 5001, Emory Motorsports, heck, Shelby American might have started it all. And now a company called Cyan Racing is doing it. Only it’s not just half a million bucks. Cyan is asking $700,000.
Wait, Cyan Who?
Cyan race team, winners of 5 world championships.
Cyan
Cyan Racing started out as Volvo’s race team.
“Cyan Racing was founded in 1996 to run the factory Volvo team in the inaugural Swedish Touring Car Championship season,” Cyan company literature says. “Success was imminent as driver Jan ‘Flash” Nilsson secured the STCC title behind the wheel of a Volvo 850 Super Touring.”
26 years later, by the end of 2021, the team had garnered five world championships in Touring Cars and won races in Sweden, Europe and Australia. So what to do next? Maybe build a street car?
In 2010 the company made a Volvo C30 under Volvo’s Polestar brand. Two years later it made a 580-hp S60 Polestar Concept Car and, “…the Polestar Performance Optimisation program continued to grow…” according to Cyan, which ran Polestar performance programs. In 2013 it launched the production version of the S60 Polestar, making 100 cars for the Australian market, where Touring Cars are appreciated, it seems. In 2014 the S60 sedan and V60 wagon were launched in eight markets around the world. Then, in 2020, Cyan built this.
“The Volvo P1800 Cyan is our interpretation of what could have been if we as a race team had been there during the sixties, racing the P1800, and got to design a grand tourer version out of our race car.”
Yeah, what could have been if the race team in the sixties had carbon fiber. Ha ha. But we get the idea.
To build the wild P1800 you see here, Cyan redid almost the entire car. In addition to some parts of the floor pan, the transmission tunnel and a few door knobs and hood releases, almost everything else is re-engineered to beyond modern standards. Even the proportions are different.
Cyan replaced the P1800’s original live rear axle with its own lightweight double wishbone suspension. The rear end is a Holinger differential. The transmission is also Holinger, a five-speed manual with a dogleg first gear. It rides on 18-inch center lock forged wheels with 245 front and 265 rear Pirellis. Rack and pinion steering with electric power assist on steering column keeps it pointed ahead. The carbon fiber body work is bonded to high-strength steel underneath to aid rigidity. The whole thing weighs 2182.5 pounds. It’s stopped by AP Racing brakes and powered by a 420-hp direct-injection inline four-cylinder turbo – with Borg Warner EFR engine management – driving the rear wheels.
“The stock Volvo engine has variable cams,” said engine man Mattias Evansson. “Of course, we removed those, because we don’t need the low-end torque.”
Whaaat? First red flag! A race car doesn’t need low-end torque, a street car does.
The car’s rack and pinion steering was originally going to have no assist whatsoever, but the team added a column-mounted electric power steering system for getting around in parking lots.
The castor, camber and toe were all set up more for racing, which comes with its own set of uncomfortableness. As we would soon find out.
The generous people at Cyan had the car in L.A. and were letting select journos drive it. I talked my way into a drive up Angeles Crest Highway last Friday to go to the Good Vibrations Breakfast Club at Newcomb’s Ranch.
It takes a minute to climb through the roll cage and into the car. I’d set the four-point belts out of the way, which helped in getting in. The seat was more bolt-upright than I would have liked but there was no recline because, race car. The engine started right up, which was nice, and idled just fine, which was also nice. Releasing the parking brake required slotting your fingers between the roll cage and the side of the seat, which was awkward. Then you had to shove out of your mind the thought that this was someone else’s $700,000 car and just start driving.
It was loud, not the loudest thing I’ve ever driven, but louder than a refined modern sports car. Vision was fine, no big blocks caused by seating position, roll cage or all-new windshield.
Despite the lack of variable cams, there was a sufficient amount of low-end torque to get around without having to rev the four-cylinder unduly, so maybe Evansson was right and you don’t need variable cams. But the suspension wasn’t set up to my liking. It bounced a little bit too much. And the steering wandered off-center, requiring constant micro-corrections in long turns. While most “modern” cars return to center when you let go of the wheel, this one needed attention all the time. When the rear end was loaded or unloaded I could feel just a little bit of a yaw moment. Again, all things you’d tolerate in a race car but which I, in my own worthless opinion, wouldn’t want in a street car, especially if I’d paid $700,000 for it.
But then, like all these resto-makers, they can set yours up exactly as you like. The Guntherwerks Porsche 911 I drove last year, for instance, was set up for track use only, and I drove that on the same road as this one. Likewise, a race-ready Fiat Abarth I drove a couple years before that was wildly impractical for daily commuting, but would have been great for time trials. To each his own – and my own does not include a 700-grand budget.
“Each Volvo P1800 Cyan is built to be exactly what the client wants it to be,” Cyan says. “Anything from a light weight, high performance cafe racer, to a grand tourer to be enjoyed along winding roads early summer mornings. The opportunities for customer adaptation are plentiful and customer satisfaction is the whole purpose.”
Volvo P1800 Cyan takes off from the Good Vibes Breakfast Club.
Mark Vaughn
When we arrived at the Good Vibes Breakfast Club, all was forgiven. The car drew an instant crowd of all those car-knowledgeable enthusiasts, all of whom thought it was pretty cool. Social media posts on the P1800 likewise received loads of positive comments. Everyone loved it.
And it was pretty cool. Even in cool-car-saturated L.A. you will not see anything like this every day, or ever. Cyan says it can make 100 of them and that you’ll be able to see this one along with the first U.S. customer delivery car up at Monterey Car Week at The Quail. If you don’t catch it driving around L.A., look for it there. And begin now to sort out your own particular suspension, steering, wheels and tires. The rest of it is wildly cool and maybe even worth all 700 Gs.
Keyword: The Volvo P1800 Cyan Shows What the Past Could Have and Should Have Been