Our Cars: Peugeot 106 Rallye

They did a great job, even calling me up when they measured my axle to report that it was set up about 10mm high, and to check how I wanted the car to sit: most customers look to drop the stance by 10 to 20mm. No need – I wanted it bang on original ride height. They obliged, and it’s probably more accurately set up now than when it rolled off the line.

I’d stripped the rear brakes in order to send the axle off, so of course it would be silly to put the old ones back on. As luck would have it, Brembo makes uprated aftermarket performance brake kits that keep the original dimensions – and the original rear drum setup. They look 100 per cent stock – even having nice solid front discs, no silly cross-drilling or pointless grooving – but they do stop quite a bit better than the originals. Of course, ‘big brake’ conversions are very popular for these cars, and many Series 1s like mine have been converted to wear the later Series 2 disc brakes on the rear, but I want to keep the car as stock as possible, and it’s never going to be used in real anger on track or in a rally. I don’t need bigger brakes, just better brakes.

Now, I could not have new brakes and dampers on the rear and leave the front ‘in its juice’ as the French would say, could I? So off came the front struts, and while I was in there under the front arches, in went new Bilsteins, refurbished driveshafts and the aforementioned Brembos.

Now, all of this led to me spending quite a lot more than a Saturday afternoon lying under the car with three decades of grit falling in my eyes. This gave me a great opportunity to closely inspect its underpinnings from up close and personal. And it’s remarkably solid for a 30-year-old cheap-as-chips French hatch. Now, this might be due to its spending its early life on the dry dusty roads of Greece rather than the wintry roads of the Haute Savoie where it now lives. But for whatever reason, the floor-pan is remarkably clean, the fasteners (mostly) unrusted and even the brake lines look fairly respectable. So I decided that it deserved to be kept that way, and to get the underside properly cleaned, re-painted and waxed.

Now, I am half-competent on most jobs on my own cars, but I have neither the equipment, OCD or skills required for paintwork. Luckily, another thing about ‘youngtimers’ like the 106 is that there is a growing network of small independent garages to call upon. I’d driven past one of these – L’Atelier Retro – several times. So I called in, and immediately liked the gaffer, a friendly, enthusiastic young chap with the marvellous handle of Mickaël Veyrat-Charvillon, who makes his living in restoring, servicing and generally fettling recent-classic Pugs of all kinds.

Mickaël waited for some good weather, then steam-cleaned the underside of the car before leaving it to dry very thoroughly. He then re-sprayed the underside in a bulletproof stone, snow and salt resistant undercoat that should preserve the little beastie for many more years, even in our unforgiving climate. Purists will point out that it should be white under the arches, but the car is far from concours, so I don’t really mind. Mickaël also freshened up the paintwork on top – it was still pretty good on the more-vertical surfaces of the car, but the roof and hood were oxidised beyond polishing. So he repainted the bonnet fully, blew over the roof, and cut back and polished the rest to freshen it up. It looks great – again, not concours, but a lot brighter than it did. A new set of decals (applied a lot straighter than the factory ever did) also helps make it look a bit less like a sad mutt in the corner of the pound.

The motor? Well it’s still eager and fighty with 140,000km on the clock. Mickaël – who knows these units inside-out – advised me to leave well alone, so it just got a valve adjustment and an oil change for luck.

So what’s it like now? Well, it’s as close to stock as you can get, 30 years later. And all the better for it. It brakes, steers and stops just as it did when it blew journalists away in 1995. And it still blows me away now. It’s fun in the dry, sure, but to really feel how good this thing is, you need to drive it on a cold, dreich day, when everyone else is tippy-toeing around the twisty local roads, many of which are lined by the kind of serious drops that give the phrase ‘track limits’ real teeth. The 106 is an absolute hoot in these conditions. No weight, little power and low-but-predictable-grip means that you throw it faster and faster into bends, not even thinking about the brake pedal and keeping the throttle hovering in or near that thin red carpet pile. It’s one of the few cars that has made me laugh out loud at just how stupidly you can chuck it in, with no worries about getting it out again.

Three things strike me about this mini rolling-restoration. First, that working on these cars is like worshipping at the altar of engineering simplicity. There is nothing superfluous, nothing that is not precisely fit for function, not a gram or a cent of waste. I’ve had the luck to poke around various supercars and hypercars, and while money-no-object machined titanium and gold-foil heatshields are impressive in their own way, the sheer minimalism of a 106 leaves me in awe of the self-discipline of the engineers who created it.

Secondly, it’s underlined what a wonderful network of enthusiasts there is around these newer classics. From friendly and inclusive Facebook groups, to unfussy specialists who really know their stuff, to small local garages whose staff are more likely to genuinely admire your car than to look down their noses at it. Truly refreshing.

And finally, it reminds me just how good value these cars are. The bits I fitted may wear fancy names like Brembo or Bilstein, but they cost hundreds, not thousands of pounds. Bearings and other consumables cost a few quid and can be ordered from any Peugeot dealer. The local garage pressed a bearing in for me over their coffee break and charged me less than the said brew would cost in Starbucks. In these times when you sometimes feel slightly shocked by the numbers on the pump after simply filling up your car, it’s nice to look at the bill for rejuvenating a little future-classic like this and feel slightly smug at how reasonable it is.

The problem I have now is that I keep thinking about what a wonderful job Tolman Motorsport has done with its 205 GTI restomods. Now, just imagine a 106 Rallye in the same spirit… Better stop there before I do something stupid.