Already being styled as a supercar, a race car version of the S60 was recently revealed by Volvo. The new S60 will represent Volvo in the Australian V8 Supercars series starting this March.

In a joint effort with Polestar, a firm which specializes in tuning and modifying Volvos which also functions as Volvo’s official factory racing team, Volvo brought the new S60 to Australia in an effort to bolster the brand’s presence in racing. The new S60 will be fielded by the Volvo factory team, though a number of firms have rendered services for the development of the car.

The V8 Supercars series mandates that each car have a V8, with a displacement no greater than 5.0 liters and rev at a maximum of 7,500 rpm. Volvo developed its own V8 for the new race car in conjunction with Polestar. The new 5.0 liter engine is an improvisation of the 4.4 liter Yamaha previously employed by Polestar on other projects. In parity with the competition it’ll face at the V8 Supercars series, the new engine maxes out at 7,500 rpm and puts out 650 horsepower, reaching 62 mph in 3.2 seconds.

It’s unlikely Volvo developed this brand new engine solely for the sake of competing in the V8 Supercars series, so perhaps this is a foreshadowing of what’s to come for the S60 line. We’ll likely see the V8 S60 make its way into other racing series over the next couple of years. In addition, maybe Volvo will channel some of these developments into the consumer market. No performance consumer version of the S60 model is directly available from Volvo, but this may not be the case for long, and perhaps a consumer version of the V8 S60 may hit the market in the next few years. It’d certainly be a step up from the current six cylinder variant, and could bite into the market share of the BMW M3 sedan or the Audi S4. It’s a little premature to speculate, but it appears as though the S60 has an interesting future.