Volkswagen says, “No Polo R for you!”

Just last week motorauthority.com brought us this Polo R rendering. It looks great, too. Speculation of a new hot Polo from R GmbH had been building for some time. However, according to a new report plans for a Polo R have been shelved, if they ever existed.

Talk of a 160kW Polo R certainly sounded enticing. However, Dr Ernst Linder, Polo’s technical boss, poured cold water over that idea, “I would say there have been some ideas about, but more in the press than the company itself because we have our GTI and within our company Audi has an S1.”

Linder also reckons 160kW is unlikely from the 1.4-litre twincharged engine that he says will power the Audi S1, “I think with the 136kW in the Audi S1 I think the engine is reaching the borderline. I think you could get some more out of it but I don’t think anymore than 10 or 20kW.”

Hmm, so Linder has spilled the beans on the power output of the S1, at 136kW it’s a modest increase on the 132kW found in the Polo GTI. Has he told us anything else? Well, as it happens he might have. There has been a lot of guesswork in regards to the drivetrain for the S1. An Audi bestowed with an “S” badge must have quattro, right?

“If we put much more horsepower in the [Polo], we need something like four-wheel-drive. This is a technical feature that is very expensive,” said Linder. Sure, that’s not a definitive answer to the direction Audi will take, but it does tend to confirm the thoughts of those who say the S1 will be front-wheel drive only.

After all that Linder did deliver some good news for those who like a few more herbs to go with their Volkswagens. There will be a Jetta R, although he didn’t give anything away on that one. The next Jetta is still around 12 months away, so an R model could be even longer. Given the front-wheel drive Scirocco R and all-wheel drive Golf R use what is essentially the same EA113 2.0 litre turbo it wouldn’t be a long stretch to expect the same engine to arrive in the Jetta R.

AUSmotive’s educated guess is the Jetta R would be powered by the front wheels only. The Scirocco R seems to handle this task with some degree of competence and a 4motion system would rob the Jetta R of valuable boot space.

[Source: drive.com.au]