December - KT4 Performance

For the month of December, we are featuring James Noori’s ’05 S60 R

James writes,

“My name is James, and I am 26 years old. I live in a city in Sweden called Örebro. My passion for Volvo started when I was a kid. My grandfather was a businessman, importing cars, mostly European brands. He would import everything from BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, and of course, Volvo. Out of all of the cars he imported, only a few would turn out to be the apple of his eyes, and more often than not, they were Volvos. 144 and 244 are the ones I clearly remember from back in the day. I loved how he cared for those cars and how he always boasted about how safe and comfortable they are to drive. He wasn’t a particularly fast driver, but in the end, he was the one who sparked the Volvo love in me.

Many years later, I got the opportunity to move to Sweden, the motherland of Volvo. I knew from the beginning that I’d be aiming to get my Swedish driver’s license and get me a nice Volvo – and that’s exactly what I did. It was in 2015 when I bought my very first car, which was a 2001 Volvo S60 T5. There was only 1 owner before me, and it included basically all of the options available on it, including the infamous Spaceball gear lever setup. It was a fantastic car, I fell totally in love with it but I always had my eyes on the R model. I read about the P2Rs and their potential issues every day. Despite what the internet said, I wanted one so bad, and I was searching every day to find a nice example on the classifieds.

It was then the summer of 2016 that I finally found the perfect S60R, which was mechanically sound and had a well-documented history behind it. It is the R that I own now, but unfortunately, back in the day I didn’t have the money to buy it, and the owner at that time didn’t want to go down on the price. Therefore, I waited and it was sold to another person. Almost half a year after that, the same car came up for sale, but before I could even contact him, someone else saw and bought the car. But as we say in Sweden, “he who waits for something good, never waits too long”. The same car came back for sale again and this time I was super fast and bought it immediately when I saw it, even though I had to travel quite far to get to it. A properly maintained 2005 M66 S60R with the OEM sports package and every option imaginable on a 05 model, what’s not to love? It even had a 3″ catback custom stainless steel exhaust on it with no resonator and a small muffler.

I then had the car for a while and wanted to keep it maintained the same way as it should have been, so I started by renovating the front suspension. My next plan was to upgrade the intercooler and the radiator before anything else. So I bought a drop in intercooler and radiator as a package, installed them, and replaced the PCV system too. Next up was to get me a stage 1 ECU upgrade, which added around 60bhp to the car and turned up the boost to 17-18psi. A short shifter kit made especially for P2R cars is now installed in the car along with a boost gauge integrated into the cluster bezel, 20″ Polestar wheels wrapped in Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires, EBC Redstuff mated with Brembo discs and custom taillights.

Oh, the color? Yeah everyone wonders about that. I have not resprayed the car, and I haven’t wrapped it in 3M film either. It is Autoflex. Some people like to call it a liquid wrap. It’s simply sprayed on the car and it looks and behaves exactly like normal paint. You can polish it, wash it, and maintain it like normal paint. You can remove it from the car with no difficulties after you are tired of it.

There are a lot of other things I’ll be doing on the car for this winter, from making the 2.5L block stronger to replacing the 4C struts and lower the car with TME springs. But those are yet to be applied.

I would like to thank my sponsors, Orchard Autocare Sweden for providing me with handmade and fabulous car care products. Also SGS Styling for spraying that fab looking Autoflex on my car!”