Our Cars: Ben’s 205 GTI

As a contributor, I decided to mark CAR‘s 50th by buying one of its top 50; although on a writer’s wage, my car needed to come from the tail end of that value spectrum. I’d already owned five of them, and this time found myself drawn to one of the French cars in that line-up. I’d always wanted a Citroen DS, and still do. It is laden with significance but can be endless trouble: I could have afforded the car but probably not the bills. The Renault 4 was another contender: it defines idiosyncratic, democratic French motoring at least as well as the 2CV I’d owned before, but this time I wanted something quicker for Sunday mornings and empty roads.

And then I saw it. Second row, behind the McLaren. A genuine performance icon: one of the finest-handling front-wheel drive cars, arguably the greatest hot hatch ever made, and a car which in the Eighties got early-teenage me as excited as a Countach or a Testarossa. A car which unquestionably deserved to be on a magazine cover and could light you up on a Sunday morning, yet back then could still be bought in decent condition for three grand. Three grand! So I did.

My mint, completely original, white 1989 Peugeot 205 GTI 1.9 was sourced on PistonHeads after a couple of glasses of red on a Monday night, and came from the long-term care of a chap called Craig, a bodywork specialist at a noted Ferrari restorer. ‘Buy the seller’, goes the old adage, and there are few better sellers than one whose car smelled of the same expensive waxes he applied to Daytonas at his day job, and who came out with his family to wave his old car off, tear in eye.

I won’t waste words explaining the appeal of the 205 GTI: if you’re here, you know. But this is an ‘our cars’ piece, so instead let me try to describe what it has come to mean to me since I drove away in it a decade ago: and might mean to you too, if I can persuade you to buy one.

Firstly, embarrassingly, I’d never actually driven a 205 GTI before: a sackable offence for a motoring journalist. Buying one was an easy way to put that right. Secondly, and more importantly, it serves as a useful mental reset. If I’ve driven a thousand-horsepower hypercar, the Peugeot reminds me that 130bhp can be quite enough. If I’ve driven a succession of dull moderns, it can make me fall in love with driving again. As a motoring journalist, a car like this ought to be an allowable business expense.

And the longer I live with it, the greater the contrast with modern cars, with their ever-increasing power and weight and size and complexity. The Pug feels ever smaller, lighter and more agile with the passage of time, with better visibility through that big, bright glasshouse, and easier to park. There’s comparatively less stuff in it to absorb the noise and fizz that makes us feel connected to an old car, and whose absence or absorption isolates us from a new one.

And it’s odd how ubiquity blinds us to a car’s prettiness. When 205s of all kinds were ten-a-penny on our roads we didn’t look twice at them. But as it becomes increasingly rare that shape seems to get prettier, and people even keener to come up and talk about it, telling me about the one their dad had or that they crashed at 19. One van driver even dismounted when we stopped behind him at the lights and ran back to give us the thumbs-up. My kids – both born after I bought it – adore that about the ‘little white car’. And they think we’re doing a ton, when in fact we’re doing 40.

It’s not the case that modern cars will inevitably suffer by comparison with a sub-800kg hatchback. Car makers simply can’t make mainstream models as tinny, light, noisy, feral and fun as this any more. I don’t expect them to, and I know what I’d rather be in should the worst happen.

And there’s plenty that’s truly rubbish about the Pug. It has always had a lumpy idle, truculent low-speed manners, heavy steering and cornflake interior quality, even when new. On my first trip in it with my then wife, the rear view mirror leapt off the windscreen as we took a small yump at pace. She caught it neatly, and turned to me with an expression that wordlessly asked what on earth I’d bought. I still have the car, but no longer the wife. A very senior car industry executive – the proper, multi-billion dollar decision-making kind – borrowed it for a week and returned sufficiently transfixed by the way it drove to make an offer to buy it, but having had to rewire the electric windows himself: the full old French car experience.

It’s not for sale, of course. I’ve now owned it longer than any other car: 10 years in October. In that time my actual 205 has appeared twice on the cover of the magazine that inspired its acquisition, once alongside an F40 and a 2.7 RS, among others. Not bad for a three-grand purchase. CAR turns 60 this year. I wonder if they’ll ask us back.