The Skoda Enyaq RS Race Is Where Sensible Meets Silly

Skoda is an unrelentingly sensible car company, but everyone’s got a wild streak buried somewhere. Don’t forget that for years now, Skoda Fabias have seen huge success in rallying’s second-tier Rally2 category, and anyone who builds cars designed to be flung over jumps and down dirt roads inches from very immovable pine trees must know how to have fun. Now, those two sides of the brand have been united in this: the Skoda Enyaq RS Race.

Don’t get too excited about being able to buy a road-ready electric rally car – it’s just a concept, and will remain so. It uses the warmed-over Enyaq vRS as its base, which means an electric motor at each end developing a total of 335bhp and 339lb ft of torque.

In the road car, that not-inconsiderable power is somewhat dampened by its 2.3-tonne heft. The Race, though, sheds 316kg through getting rid of anything not totally necessary, and replacing plenty of the body panels and interior bits with lightweight biocomposite pieces. Much of this is made from flax fibre, a more sustainable alternative to trad carbon fibre.

These weight-saving measures are teamed with a significantly wider, lower stance – 72mm wider up front, 112mm at the rear, and dropped by 70mm – all accommodated by those delicious box flares. You also can’t miss the gigantic rear wing, angry new front bumper and rear diffuser, and lightweight, vented bonnet.

The hardware has been given a going-over, too: the standard braking system has been replaced by a carbon-ceramic one, with four-piston callipers and the rear and beefy 10-piston ones up front. Best of all, there’s a rally-spec hydraulic handbrake for pulling off big, improbable skids.

Individual adjustable sports suspension underpins everything along with new lightweight 20-inch wheels with low-profile tyres. A racing-style linear steering rack, with electronically adjustable weighting, has been fitted too. It’s now a strict two-seater, with racing buckets replacing the regular front seats and a competition-grade roll cage taking up all the space formerly occupied by the rear bench.

While the standard Enyaq vRS’s 112mph top speed is unchanged, Skoda says the RS Race will crack 62mph in “under five seconds” – the production car manages it in 5.5 seconds, for reference. It’s also got a louder sound amplifier for what Skoda calls a “characteristic, exhilarating motorsport sound.”

You can expect to be able to walk into your local Skoda dealer and buy one of these… never. Instead, Skoda says it’s been developed as a testbed for the sort of sustainable, lightweight materials it wants to incorporate into future production cars. And also, we suspect, for the express purpose of doing big, smoky drifts.