LADA SPORT ROSNEFT’s trio of FIA World Touring Car Championship racers will relish driving the all-new Vesta TC1 challenger according to the company’s President Bo Andersson.
Rob Huff, Mikhail Kozlovskiy and James Tompson will race the Vesta in this year’s WTCC, which gets underway in Argentina next week (6-8 March). And Andersson is convinced of the car’s potential.
“The new racing challenger based on the Vesta model looks really impressive and our drivers confirm its huge potential on the racing track,” said Andersson. “The interesting thing is that just a couple of days before the track debut of the Vesta TC1, we launched a pre-production series of the street version of Vesta in Izhevsk, Russia, where mass production of this model will start in September 2015.”
Much of the design and engineering of the LADA Vesta TC1 was carried out by LADA and LADA Sport in Russsia with support of long-term partner and consultant ORECA in France. “They assist us with some racing components in conjunction with our designers and engineers around a Russian-built Vesta chassis,” Andersson explained.
“ORECA is our engine supplier; their new 380bhp turbo engine was significantly improved in comparison with the unit used in the LADA Granta in 2014. Our French partners also assisted with aerodynamics, which are more efficient and now provide much higher straightline speed and better performance overall. However, the LADA Vesta racing car is a certainly a Russian endeavour. I wish our LADA SPORT ROSNEFT team a very successful season, and I believe we will gain more victories this year.”