Shock! Vauxhall’s made an electric Corsa rally car

Everything Vauxhall’s told us about the new Corsa so far suggests it’ll be different. More interesting than the learner-driver special of old. More sophisticated. There’s even a fully electric version.

Which has spawned this. Meet the Corsa-e Rally, an actual, proper rally car based upon the 134bhp plug-in hatchback. It’ll be the star of the world’s first fully-electric rally championship, the ADAC Opel e-Rally Cup.

That replaces the Opel Rallye Cup, which comprised of a grid of Opel Adams and was aimed at snaring newcomers to rallying with small, accessible and relatively cheap little competition cars. Which also happened to be a total riot. And there was you forgetting the Vauxhall Adam even existed…

With the Adam now out of production, it needed replacing as the company’s entry-level rally car and that task has fallen to a Corsa most people will buy to ditch fossil fuels and save money. The Corsa-e Rally is cheap by motorsport standards, mind, at around £46,000 – twenty grand more than its road car equivalent.

It uses the same powertrain – so 134bhp and 192lb ft of torque – but you can probably forget its claimed 200-mile range when you’re attacking rally stages at flat-chat. Top speed is 94mph and 0-62mph takes 8.1secs. Told you it was for newcomers.

It weighs around 1,400kg, which is a wee bit for a rally car, but unavoidable with motors and batteries on board. The ESP and ABS have been deactivated, there’s new suspension and the front axle gains a Torsen differential to better distribute that instant torque on muddy surfaces.

The e-Rally Cup kicks off in summer 2020, with 15 of these Corsas touted for the first season. Fancy a go? Or would you like to see Peugeot turn the mechanically identical e-208 into a rally car, too?