A LANDY JOINS A LEYAT

AS A reader of Octane from the very start, I have been happily following the success story of your magazine… until last Christmas.

Frankly speaking, my wife has started hating your magazine, because Mark Dixon’s reports of buying a 1955 Land Rover 107 were the little extra push I needed to visit Le Bon Coin – a kind of French ‘Gumtree’ website – and fall for a nice older restoration of a 1955 86in Station Wagon. I’d been wanting one for ages, having received a Corgi Toys model in RAC blue when I was a child.

The Station Wagon’s body was stripped to bare metal and then varnished to prevent oxidation. Inside it’s been painted battleship grey with green seats, all of which gives it a kind of military look – even though it will mainly be used for picnics on the mountains around Megève with our Rhodesian Ridgeback and for buying morning croissants. It needs a set of correct period wheels and a bit of fiddling to get it back on the road, but nothing serious.

My wife hates it when I bring home more classics, despite the fact that we already have in our living room in Paris a 1923 Leyat Hélica propellor car [pictured above right]. I have shown it occasionally at concours d’élégance and have done the Goodwood hillclimb with it!

The Leyat has always been in the family; my grandfather, Jean-Jacques Peugeot, bought it new during the 1920s and it was his daily driver for a few years before he got married and bought an Amilcar for the honeymoon (my grandmother was a bit terrified of setting behind him in the Hélica). But he never sold his first car.

The Hélica sat neglected at the back of his garage until the end of WW2, when German soldiers were looking for any kind of transport to escape back to the East. They suceeded in starting it but luckily they hit an apple tree in the grounds of the Peugeot mansion and the car stayed there safely for another half-century until I inherited it.

I decided to gently restore it while keeping it as original as possible. It’s now fully road legal – can you imagine what it’s like? It has a British ABC twin-cylinder engine which is pull-started like a lawnmower, steering on the back wheels, and brakes only on the front… JEAN-FRANÇOIS BOUZANQUET PARIS, FRANCE