‘We took a £1000 banger and applied motor sport expertise’
Chris Tolman’s nostalgia for an old hot-hatch touched off an extraordinary restoration when race-bred expertise transformed this Peugeot 205GTI into something even better than you remember
It was a bit scuffed, it ran badly and it had been modified – a strut brace, the wrong air filter, some racy-looking pedals, that sort of thing – and the badges were missing,’ says Chris Tolman of this Peugeot 205GTI. ‘But it looked like a really good ’shell. I wanted the least rotten one I could find. I later found out it wasn’t as solid as it looked.’ Chris bought this car seven years ago, when ratty ones were still available for beer money. He paid £1000 for it, and at that money it was less ratty than many others. ‘If you drive any firstgeneration hot hatch now, it never feels as quick or as exciting as it did back in the day. That was the challenge we had to overcome – to build a 205GTI that looked right and felt right but could deliver all the thrills it did when new, without needing a pair of rose-tinted glasses.’
Chris’s motor sport and restoration business, Tolman Engineering, took off and kept him busy until he found time early in 2019 to start stripping the car. By this point, what had been a purely personal project – based around the nostalgia of owning one when he was 20 – had morphed into something else, as he explains, ‘I went to see a supposedly well-restored Renault Clio Williams and it was a shocker. If hot hatches were finally worth restoring, surely we could do it far better than that. So I decided we could do the 205 as a training tool and also discover if it was commercially viable to do more jobs like this.’
That idea of doing more of them is now tempting, but back in early 2019, Chris couldn’t be sure where the car would lead him. A sign of the struggles ahead emerged as soon as stripdown began.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst
As the little Peugeot came apart to fill boxes and shelves, Chris and his team noticed some inconsistencies in the way it was built. It’s a 1992 GTI 1.6 on a J-plate, and as such was constructed after Peugeot upgraded the model to include a redesigned interior, detail changes to exterior lights and new fuel injection. In practice, however, Peugeot was obviously still using up what it had, as Chris explains, ‘The car had 15-inch wheels like a 1.9 GTI, not the 14-inch items that were standard for a 1.6, but it had them from new… with drum brakes at the back, like any other 1.6 model. Who knows why? And the wiring loom turned out to be a salad of series 1.5 and series 2 parts but with the later throttle body. The 1.6 went out of production not long after this car was made – maybe that explains it. But it encouraged us to fit bigger brakes under the 15-inch wheels and make sections of our own loom, especially because I wanted to use a more modern injection and management system.’
With the tired-looking interior removed and all the mechanical components stripped off, the team found evidence of a thump on the passenger side of the car. But it was the subsequent discovery that made Chris’s heart sink, as he explains.
‘It’s pretty much impossible to see until the bodyshell is stripped, but the inner wings had rotted where they meet the bulkhead. I could repair one side by letting in new metal but the corrosion on the other side was too extensive and I had to find a replacement panel. That meant days of searching and eventually a £500 bill from a contact who located one in France.
Challenges over parts supply would keep Chris busy throughout the build, and as work continued to the bodyshell, the mechanical parts began their own journey back to good health.
Low Point ‘30 year old plastic parts breaking… then not being able to find replacments!’
Chris Tolman
A quart from a pint pot?
The engine rebuild for the 205 had two objectives – first, like any other rebuild, to find and correct any damage. Second, it had to make enough power in the useful section of the rev range to beat any standard 1.6 GTI. But why not switch to a 1.9, if performance was key? Chris explains the thinking.
‘The 1.6 engine wasn’t much less powerful than the 1.9 version… there was only between 5 and 10bhp in it, depending on which versions you compare, so most of the difference you feel in the 1.9 is mid-range torque. And with modern engine management, plus the right build, I reckoned we could achieve that but keep the car’s character and original engine.’
The 1.9 unit gained its extra 300cc capacity from a longer stroke, so the 1.6 was always a sweeter, more rev-happy, unit. And the car has other more prosaic advantages like drum brakes on the rear, meaning you get a handbrake that actually works, unlike the one operating on the 1.9’s rear discs. Add to this the 1.6’s underdog status, slightly better fuel economy and comparative rarity today, and you have enough reasons to keep the capacity as it was when it left the factory. So what did they find?
‘It was fairly horrible,’ says Matt Clarke, Tolman’s engine builder. ‘The cylinder head gasket had given up and although the engine ran, it was blowing water out of the exhaust. Then when I stripped it down, I found the oil pump was full of bits of silicone.’
Matt thinks a previous owner had tightened up the 205’s rather thin pressed steel sump too hard and distorted it, leading to an oil leak that someone then tried to fix with a bead of silicone. The leak remained, of course, but stray bits of silicone found their way into the oil system and wound up in the pump. Luckily, the car hadn’t done enough miles since that ‘repair’ for one of these fragments to block a crucial oilway and destroy a bearing.
‘The crankshaft survived really well,’ says Matt. ‘It only needed a polish. I could re-use the conrods and pistons too. The crank was balanced as part of the rebuild but the rods and pistons had good balance as standard, so didn’t need any work’
The top end of the engine did, however. Matt cleaned up roughness in the inlet and exhaust ports and replaced the valve guides, also shaving the cylinder head’s mating face to raise the compression ratio slightly. This change brings forward the cam timing a tiny amount, but that’s something the new engine management system could cope with quite easily.
‘We wanted to keep the original look, so the airflow meter remains but I took its internals out - it’s a big compromise as standard,’ says Matt. ‘I modified the engine’s wiring harness to take in a manifold air pressure sensor in the bottom of the inlet manifold, a crankshaft sensor on a new lightened flywheel and a throttle position sensor on a new bracket on the throttle body. Then hooked it all up to a Motec ECU.’
Chris Tolman has been working with Motec for 14 years and has found the M130 Lite to be the most affordable way to gather all the control he needs. ‘The car’s old Bosch system controlled fuel only, via the airflow meter. Now we can control the fuel delivery and spark timing, but leave the coil and distributor cap in place so that everything still looks standard.’