The P1800 Cyan is a classic Volvo built like a modern racer

The Volvo P1800 Cyan is not from Volvo but from a company close to Volvo’s heart: Cyan Racing, formerly the Volvo race team known from 1996 to 2015 as Polestar. It’s the outfit that gave Volvo its first world touring car title in 2017 (and two subsequent WTC titles) so it knows a bit about both Volvos and making them go fast.

The idea behind it, as Cyan Racing founder and chief executive Christian Dahl explains, is to imagine what a roadgoing version of a P1800 race car would have been like in the 1960s, had such a car ever been built. It never was because the P1800 was never a race car.

In fact the P1800, for all its style, was never a fast car in its day. Even the best fuel-injected version had only 130PS and a 0-60mph time of around 9.5 seconds. No performance figures are quoted for its 2020 successor but with 420PS (309kW) and weighing in at under a tonne, it is sure to be rapid. Cyan just says the car will be capable on a circuit and civilised on road.

Making a P1800 deliver this duality of performance is not easy, and not does it come cheaply: it’s reported that your own reborn P1800 Cyan will set you back half a million dollars, or around £380,000.

As the mostly unaltered looks suggest, this is a real P1800, a 1964 model, whose steel unitary construction has been reinforced with new high-strength steel and carbon-fibre. The track is wider, the wheels and brakes bigger, the glasshouse repositioned and the live axle replaced with an independent rear end. The miracle is it looks as much like an original as it does.

There’s still a 2.0-litre, turbocharged four-cylinder engine under the bonnet driving the rear wheels, but with 420PS, 455Nm (336lb ft) of torque and a redline of 7,700rm, it’s nothing like the engine in the original car. It is in fact a version of the unit from the Volvo S60 TC1 race car, tweaked to deliver a more linear power delivery. It’s hooked up to a bespoke Holinger five-speed manual ‘box and drives through a carbon propshaft to a limited-slip diff.

The whole car weighs in at 990kg and comes without any driver aids – not even a brake servo – in keeping with Cyan’s desire to “reconnect with the past” and keep the driving experience as analogue as possible.

“Our company was founded in 1996 to race Volvo cars in Sweden and the Volvo P1800 Cyan is closing the circle for us,” says Dahl. “The Volvo P1800 Cyan is our interpretation of what could have been. We decided to slow down time and take the best from the golden ‘60s and combine it with our capabilities of today, keeping a pure yet refined driving experience.”

Six things you may not know about the original P1800

• The earliest P1800 bodies were assembled in Britain… by Jensen in West Bromwich.
• An 1800S is in the Guinness Book of Records as the highest mileage private car ever, Irv Gordon of New York having driven it, wait for it… 3.2 million miles between 1966 and 2018.
• Around 40,000 P1800s were sold in 12 years from 1961, but the car that came before it, the P1900, was not so successful: only 68 were ever sold.
• The P1800 was designed by a yacht designer. Swede Pelle Helmer Petterson was a student at the Frua design studio in Italy when he penned the Volvo. He is more famous for designing the Maxi brand of yachts.
• The P1800 was an early TV star car when Simon Templar, played by Roger Moore, drove one in The Saint after Jaguar refused to supply an E-type, another car launched at the Geneva Motor Show in 1961.
• The shooting brake ES version launched in 1972 proved short-lived but influential, the Reliant Scimitar GTE rival’s frameless, all-glass tailgate popping up later on cars like the Volvo 480 and then C30.