‘The most modest journeys feel like daunting adventures in a 2CV’
We take a trip to see a parts-hoarding Citroën 2CV expert in one of the earliest examples in the UK. Can you have a great drive in a car that’s incapable of breaking most speed limits?
As far as automotive history is concerned the roads to the west of Bourne, in the flattest part of Lincolnshire, are perhaps the least appropriate place to drive a Citroën 2CV4. Bourne’s automotive legacy is focused on that most power- crazed of racing marques, BRM. With no real test track other than the rutted roads of his farmyard base, BRM patriarch Raymond Mays sent his prewar ERA GP cars out on these straight, quiet fenland roads. The car I’m driving today can’t even muster enough velocity to trigger most speed cameras. But that doesn’t matter, because I’m en route to the Bourne Citroën Centre, a tiny piece of rural France in England’s breadbasket where Barry Annells and his son Peter maintain and restore flat-twin and hydropneumatic Citroëns alike.
The most modest journeys start to feel like daunting adventures when there’s a Citroën 2CV involved. Every aspect of its design is alien in comparison to the car industry’s design consensus. An air- cooled flat-twin of just 425cc drives front wheels so skinny they would look at home on a child’s tricycle. The styling appears to be a Scrapheap Challenge approximation of post-vintage design. The hunchbacked saloon body with separate flowing wings, bonnet and headlights anchor the 2CV’S visual origins in the Forties, but it’s executed using either completely flat or corrugated surfaces, giving the impression that it’s made out of recycled farmyard materials.
I climb aboard the 2CV in the centre of Spalding, a town on the River Welland whose architecture places its heyday in the 18th century, and which makes the river and a series of elegant bridges a focal point in the manner of so many rural French centres. Unfasten the tiny latch with its semi- exposed, minimal mechanism, swing open the tin-thin suicide door, sink into the driver’s seat backsidefirst, and feel the 2CV spring its first surprise of the day as it rolls heavily over on one side, then self-levels on the rebound. All the while it’s as comfortably damped as a well-used mattress, a sense emphasised by seats that look like partially folded camp-beds.
The dashboard is almost comically minimal. There’s only one integrated dial – an ammeter, unexpectedly – and two knobs, one to start the engine, the other to switch on the headlights. The speedo looks aftermarket – clamped as it is to the windscreen surround on a snaking cable, its dial’s position requiring a craned neck to read it properly. This is a reminder that in the idiosyncratic world of the 2CV, speed is thoroughly unimportant.
Around-town convenience is much higher on the agenda. Pull the starter knob and the engine whirrs enthusiastically into life in the manner of a petrol lawnmower. An air- cooled flat-twin is unusual outside of the motorcycle world – the TPV 2CV prototypes were built around BMW motorbike engines seized from retreating German forces during World War Two, after all – but amid the agriculturalism there’s sophistication unheard of even in today’s superminis.
It’s got a centrifugal clutch. Originally a key part of the 2CV’S design, it dropped into optional- extra obscurity in 1961, was phased out altogether in 1970 and made a fleeting reappearance only on the 2CV6 Special E of 1981. But once you use one it’s hard to fathom not only why it wasn’t kept as standard, but also why it didn’t catch on more widely. As with any other manual car you push the clutch pedal to disconnect drive from the flywheel when changing gear, but it won’t stall if you take your foot off the pedal with a gear engaged. This eliminates the need for clutch control and the risk of riding the pedal, and proves to be a boon as I potter through Spalding town centre. With all the speed control I need concentrated on the accelerator, the 2CV can be driven like an automatic in stop- start urban traffic. And yet it remains a manual car, its four gears selected via an angled lever whose shift pattern flows directly from one ratio to another in a sequential path transcribed in a dashboard diagram reminiscent of Harry Beck’s London Underground map.
Turning on to Winsover Road towards the village of Pode Hole, traffic picks up speed and I finally engage the 2CV’S ‘ overdrive’ fourth gear – after all, I’ve reached a heady 30mph and the flat-twin is straining. Top speed of the 425cc car is reportedly 42mph, but the 2CV4 seems most comfortable and unstressed wafting along at 35. You’d need a 1971-90 2CV6 to reach 71mph. A nd waft it does. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the 2CV is the way its design, while appearing superficially crude, manages to excel in ways that rivals would sacrifice in the name of simplicity. The long, loping travel of the suspension arms creates a gently undulating ride that sands the sharp edges off potholes, the linked springs adjusting the rear suspension in anticipation of the bump the front has just negotiated. Many modern superminis would be fired into surrounding ditches by the harshness of their own damping if you were to tackle these roads at speed. The 2CV, on the other hand, displays excellent roadholding that defies the modern logic of fat, grippy tyres. Even when the camber of the road gets so extreme past Iron Bar Drove that the car feels like it’s leaning at a 45- degree angle, there’s no threat of sliding off the edge because that cleverly adaptable suspension deals with all the punishment these bumpy lanes can deliver.
It’s a stark reminder of the world the 2CV was born into. Although a 40mph top speed may seem inadequate in the context of today’s motoring – where the reality of the motorway means the average hatchback has to possess the unruffled cruising abilities of a Seventies GT – the 2CV was designed to mobilise a country where rural and urban rarely met. The clutch was ideal for traffic- clogged Paris, and the 2CV’S limited top speed didn’t matter too much there either; yet it also suited a country where most of the population worked in agriculture. In rural communities with few metalled roads where much more than 30mph would be risky, ride quality was the key to avoiding breaking eggs and upsetting chickens, and if you needed to get from your village to a city you’d take the train anyway. To this end, a drive in this part of Lincolnshire gifts the 2CV with the opportunity to demonstrate its qualities far better than those smooth, N-road- connected rural areas of France would nowadays.
Another factor in the Citroën’s favour is its sheer simplicity. Chances are the average 2CV owner lived a long way from the nearest Citroën main dealer, but being used to working on tractors he wouldn’t have had any qualms about fixing the car himself.
I like the way the windscreen wipers work. It’s not actually raining as the car bounces over the humpback bridge spanning the River Glen at Tongue End, yet I can’t help but try them out. Pulling a knob meshes the wiper mechanism with the spinning speedo cable. They may not clear the screen very effectively, but the ingenuity of Citroën’s engineers – and their commitment to utter design simplicity while leaving no essentials out – is admirable.
As I near the old BRM garages towards the end of South Fen Road I can’t help but draw an unusual comparison between Pierre Boulanger, the engineer behind the 2CV, and Colin Chapman. Their cars couldn’t be more different in their intentions, but their design approach – of making single components do multiple jobs and minimising unnecessary weight and complexity while doing so – was very similar. I can imagine Chapman admiring the speedometerdriven wipers, the roof fabric doubling as a bootlid, the way all panels can be removed, how the car can be started with the wheelbrace, and the way that just two spring units control all four wheels. He definitely wouldn’t have liked the brakes, though. ‘Feeble’ is the word, and their ineffectiveness encourages a very responsible vigilance, my eyes fixed permanently on the road’s vanishing point. I’m lucky it’s so straight and clear around here, because an emergency stop would be impossible.
I turn right on to Cherry Holt Road, and although I’m not far from Bourne Citroën Centre now, emerging on to a relatively fast-flowing road is something of a rude awakening for the 2CV. After many miles