Barry Thorn

At what point does an ‘enthusiast’ tip the scale and become an ‘obsessive’?  I love 205′s first and foremost, which is probably already pretty obvious! But, why? I haven’t always! I learnt to drive, on my own beyond either just steering or changing gear from the passenger seat, at around the age of 7. Very luckily i might add, after always having opportunities on friends’ Farms or Business Industrial estates etc, or because my father was heavily involved with organising and running Motorsport events where i could get plenty of ‘practice’! Naturally, i guess much because of their dominance of that era and my dad’s preference, I grew up around, and loving old skool RWD stuff. Dad had a couple of Triumph Dolomite Sprints, a Volvo 240 GLT road car and i did a lot of driving around in Rear wheel drive Fords that were plentiful at the time, Mk1 & 2 Escorts etc, and for a good few years, a pale blue Mk4 Cortina Estate, was my ‘toy’! Hence, I always thought, or at least dreamed that my first car would be something rear wheel drive and fun, namely a Mk1/2 Escort, as they’ve always been a great love of mine. That was never to happen though, due to both ever-increasing values and insurance costs on seemingly anything RWD, i looked at all-sorts, even a much more modern poverty-spec E30 BMW was beyond my reach. So it was never to be, and in a long twisted tale, i stumbled across 205 GTi’s in a couple of ways.

Citroen Visa GTi – Dad was heavily involved in preparing & running a Citroen Visa GTi rally car many years ago, probably around 1990. I loved it, and obviously, although unbeknown to me way back then, it was essentially a 205 GTi underneath, bar the rear suspension. Strangely, when i joined the world of internet forums, properly at least, in around 2005, i re-discovered the Visa. D951OWA was now fitted with a 160bhp 1.9 16v ‘Mi16′ engine as originally found in 405 Mi16 and Citroen BX16v’s, also common conversion in 205′s. The Visa was being run in Sprints/Hillclimbs successfully by Darren Russell, who documented a lot of it on his website; VisaGTi.com. He’s since sold it, a few years ago now and i’m not sure where it has ended up!

Peugeot 205 GTi Cup – A few years later in the early nineties, a good friend of Dad that ran a garage at the time, the same guy that had rented & rallied the Visa and rolled it a few times, twice in almost exactly the same place comically, in Belgium if i recall, decided to go racing. The one-make Peugeot 205 cup fitted the bill, this must’ve been when i was around 9 or 10 i guess. Two 1.6 GTi road cars appeared not long after and although they remained usable on the road for the most part, modifications began and dad was using one here and there. Now, being very anti – front(‘wrong’) wheel drive, having always had Rear driven toys, i remember dad being very impressed with these little hot hatches, proclaiming they were nothing like the horrid Ford XR & RS’s, Vauxhall and even VW Hot-Hatches of the time that he’d previously sampled. I remember them always going very well and being very ‘pointy’, i think in hindsight this must’ve stuck in my mind for good reason! The 205 cup became extinct in around ’93, replaced by 106′s.

H58XYL – Many years later whilst serving my first few years of work in a Peugeot dealership, around 2000, a friend that i also worked with managed to get a mint little black 1990 second-phase 1.6 GTi that had come in as a trade-in, originally sold by ‘us’. With 1 owner, full service history & 60-odd thousand miles, it had very shiny black paintwork with red detailing, carpets and interior details. I thought it was awesome in many ways; fantastic handling, went very well for a ‘little’ 1.6 engine and was full of character, brought back distant memories of the ones i’d knew as a lad briefly years before! It was quickly fitted with a set of the larger 15″ alloys, and i remember sourcing a mint set of 1.9 black & red checked half leather seats from a friend of dad’s that had converted his 205 into a rally car. It was lightly modified over the course of a year or so and became pretty notorious in our social circles! But, the decision was made to sell it on. So despite not yet even having a road driving license(I’d already got my rally license!) or if i recall, even being 17, as well as already having a typically ‘heavily modified’ Fiesta Mk1 with 1.6 CVH conversion sat on my mum’s driveway awaiting me to obtain a driving license, i had to have it! The deal was done and it lived at work for a while, being polished every other day to within an inch of it’s life! The Fiesta was sold on at a profit not long after, and the 205 was my first proper road car when i did get my license, at great insurance cost i might add! And that was it, like a lamb to the slaughter, i was hooked and they’ve been around ever-since, usually in multiples!!

Retro-Chic or Pikey feat? – I’m basically a retro car geek to the core and love the fact that i run ‘older’ cars, some often say; “why don’t you just get one modern reliable car and stop messing around” – Which to me is wholly small minded and they’re massively missing the point, obviously!  Ok, so i don’t go to the extremes of some, let’s face it i have a few toys that aren’t quite ‘ancient’ but are old, and thus need a couple of relatively ‘modern’ cars to back them up, which in my case means 10 or so years old Volvo estates, at the moment anyway! You always get more for your money by buying older of course and i’m a firm believer that it’s a myth that a modern car is any more reliable than an old, well looked after one.

Greed or Need? I have far too many cars, always have had, to the point of it being a bit of a joke amongst friends. Give me a space and i’ll fill it, with a car. It’s not without it’s major foibles, especially when you’re me and have a habit of not removing your finger from posterior at times, and can’t resist a good bargain! Somehow i’ve never learnt a bad lesson, or luckily ever really lost out, in a typically Arthur Daley fashion, even if i don’t set out to, i’ve never lost any major money on any of the insane amount of cars i’ve owned, which must now be around 200… A scary amount of those have been 205 & 309 GTi’s. But it’s getting worrying how rare they seem to be becoming, it makes me hold my head in shame for pulling apart a few ‘good’ cars years ago, all donating their parts to keep others going of course, but the decision gets harder every time i’m faced with it these days!

But why do i have so many? Many reasons, mainly greed i suspect! But also because basically I decided years ago from a competition-use point of view, that you cannot have one 205 that does everything, a rally car set-up for rough gravel or mixed surfaces doesn’t suit much else. Equally a smooth tarmac or track dedicated car doesn’t lend itself well at all to the rough stuff! So just having one to use for all i want to do is just not possible. Well, at least not without major changes to suspension etc, and given the way 205′s are, especially the rear suspension arrangement, it becomes a major operation to do so. Even if you did, some disciplines require a different spec. interior or safety items to another, or even different engine capacity limits, so it was basically decided that there would ‘need’ to be multiples! Well, that’s my excuse. I think it all got a bit crazy from there if i’m honest!

I had a very busy January with my ‘fleet’, which i will document soon, but i’ve decided to add as much content here as i can, as and when, and treat it more of a classic blog than just a report on what i’ve been up to, so will add a bit more background etc before any recent reports!

Adenau, Germany