DELIVERANCE

The GS saved Citroën by plugging the hole in the middle of its range between the DS and 2CV. Half a century later, a rare early model demonstrates the purity of the design

The retired salesman leaned back in his armchair. “Ah, the GS! I remember the launch. Dealers were crying.” I raised an eyebrow. “Tears of joy,” he explained. “At last Citroën had listened, and come up with the car they had been demanding for so long.” The conversation stuck in my mind, and left me with a curiosity about the GS.

Because if it was the answer to those dealers’ prayers, it also had a rough start. The 1015cc engine was judged low on power, plus the car had driveability problems and poor fuel consumption – Autocar managed just 23.3mpg overall. There were also reliability woes. Received wisdom says that the GS only came good with the arrival of the 1220cc version in 1972. If that’s true, does that make the 1970 car the runt of the litter?

That salesman’s story neatly encapsulates the way Citroën came across in the pre-gs era. Complacent? Incompetent? Arrogant? Probably all three. At one end of its offerings was the unutterably basic 2CV; at the other the DS, a high-tech marvel that redefined what was possible in a mass-produced car. In between was the Ami, a rebodied 2CV with a 602cc engine, and the ID, which was a stripped-out DS.

It had taken Citroën five years to react to the Renault Dauphine with the Ami. And when Renault came out with a ‘better 2CV’, the R4, Citroën tried to take its nationalised rival to court for supposedly copying the 2CV’S design.

The Ami held the fort for a while – indeed it became France’s best-seller. But in the boom years of de Gaulle’s presidency it was clear that a dolled-up ‘Deuche’ was inadequate to plug that 2CV-TO-DS chasm. In ’64 Peugeot launched the 204, a smart, technically up-to-the-moment model that happily sat above the Ami; a year later Renault unveiled its R16, equally happily sitting below the ID and DS. As the economy expanded, both cars went on to sell in large numbers.

Happiness was in short supply at Citroën dealerships, as the two competitors ate into their market share. A second attempt to drag Renault through the courts, this time for ‘copying’ the Traction Avant in designing the R16, was a reflection of the Quai de Javel’s arrogance. What was needed was not bully-boy legal manoeuvres, but a mid-range car people wanted to buy.

But Citroën muffed it, in typical fashion, by spending far too long trying to develop a new mid-sized model… then calling quits. Having abandoned a design known as the C60, a sort of miniature DS with hydropneumatic suspension and a flat-four, in 1962 it threw its energy into a new proposition. ‘Project F’ was to have either a flat-twin or a Wankel rotary, and be available in two wheelbases with two different suspension systems: torsion-bar or hydropneumatic.

The car was intended to be on sale by ’67 but it proved a disaster. Prototypes suffered from miserable rigidity and poor roadholding. The Wankel wasn’t ready and the C60’s flat-four didn’t fit. In a final ironic twist, the torsion-bar