Peugeot 106 Rallye
Why buy a 20-year-old junior hot hatch? The owner of ours offers five reasons
LAST MONTH I INTRODUCED MY new Peugeot 106 Rallye, but I didn’t really explain why I bought it. As an evo reader you probably don’t need much convincing when it comes to cars like this, but since you’ll be seeing a lot more of it in future months, some scene-setting probably wouldn’t go amiss.
Reason one: I’ve wanted one for yonks. When the Rallye first hit the streets I was an impressionable 13 years old. So when I read the rave reviews in magazines and saw it being thrashed around on TV, it immediately struck a chord. I can recall sitting in one – Bianca White, just like mine – at a local car show around that time, and loving the slender airbag-less wheel and jazzy seat trim. I’ve still got the brochure I picked up at that show.
Fast forward 19 years and we reach reason two: the price. You’ve seen the ridiculous numbers commanded by immaculate 205 GTIS recently, and while my Series 2 Rallye is several rungs down the ladder from cars like that, it’s hard to ignore that prices are slowly creeping up. I didn’t want to miss out like I have with so many other cars in the past.
Reason three (and I’ve always wanted to say this): they don’t build ’em like they used to. Modern cars are astonishingly talented, but pickings at the affordable end of the market are much slimmer. A VW Up is fun in a superficial, drive-the-wheels-off-it kind of way, but the Panda 100HPS, Sportkas and, yes, 106 Rallyes were genuine performance cars in miniature. I couldn’t resist owning one of the best cars from a time when cheap cars could be just as fun as those at ten times the price.
Reason four: the Rallye is an antidote. It’s an antidote to holding my breath every time I’m driving a modern car and the road gets narrow. It’s an antidote to unexplorable extremes of performance and grip, to electronically generated exhaust notes, and to the crushing disappointment of yet another car with no perceptible steering feel. It’s a car I can hop into and enjoy from the moment I turn the key, without ever troubling a speed limit, yet still – thanks to a rich stream of physical and aural feedback – always feel like I’m going fast.
And reason five? I’ve always been rather fond of those white steel wheels… Dateacquired August 2017 Totalmileage 111,282 Mileagethismonth 168 Coststhismonth £0 mpgthismonth 39.3