ONE PEUGEOT MADE EARLIER
“The person at the office who fills in the health and safety form will be having a mild aneurysm right now”
This is the actual car from the advert, currently residing in Peugeot’s retirement home, otherwise known as La Réserve. Less tea and biscuits, more wheels: a warehouse stacked five-high with all the greatest road, race and marketing cars from Peugeot’s colourful past. We got wind that shelf four, aisle three was home to the battered 206 made famous in ‘The Sculptor’ ad, so thought it only right that we paid a visit.
First, the obvious: it’s a deception. This is not a modified Ambassador, as we were led to believe by movie magic, but a 206 that was pulled from the line, stripped out like a stock car and beaten to within an inch of its life, before being painted silver to make it look, erm, unpainted.
It might appear ready for the scrapheap, but in fact it has a mere 110km on the clock – as you can see on the right. In some sort of eerie record of the day and time it was prematurely plucked from the factory, the clock and calendar are frozen on 1 Jan 2000 0:40 – 40 minutes into a new milliennium. Odd.
From behind the wheel, it drives exactly as you’d expect a low-mileage diesel 206 to drive... uneventfully. The lack of sound deadening and windows slash the weight, but cause a few NVH issues. And for some reason, I couldn’t stop poking my head out the window and bobbing it like a fool.
A fascinating prop, then, but a bit half-arsed, if you ask me. Far better to throw your nuts on the fire and convert an Ambassador for real, don’t you think? Just me, then...
original idea is to employ… how do I put this?… a plus-sized actor, but that’s quickly ruled out on moral and practical grounds. Besides, a JCB comes with the added beneft of doubling as a large yellow wall for the crash scene. Nobody seems remotely worried about sourcing one for a couple of hours, at short notice and driving it into the middle of a busy university.
By far our most pressing problem, though, is that our Ambassador has already been turned into a Peugeot. In the advert, an Ambassador features quite heavily in the frst half. We need an Ambassador. In fact, we need two. One to admire and then drive in the opening scenes, and another to actually crush with the JCB, drive into a wall and hit with a sledgehammer. We sit around a bit scratching our heads before Ashish walks over to the remnants of our noble donor car, lying in a pile outside the workshop. He disappears and returns dragging a four-metre long metal box frame and announces all we have to do is weld the panels back together around the frame, stick some trolley wheels on the bottom and with some crafty camera work we have our rolling, crashable Ambassador. Pure genius.
Ashish and his team get to it immediately, rummaging around in a pile of wires, angle grinders and paint guns before emerging with a welder and shoving its exposed wires straight into the mains. The person in our ofce who flls in the health and safety form will be having a mild aneurysm right now, but out here it’s just the way things tick… how stuf gets done. It’s why the answer to every question, however bizarre, is automatically yes. Then comes the fun part: fnding a solution by whatever means necessary.
It becomes an overarching theme on our trip, that anything’s possible if you’re prepared to go the extra mile, really challenge yourself and take 240V for the team. During a night shot we need a bit more light.
Not an issue. A single bulb on a wire appears from nowhere, is slung over the branch of a tree and wrapped in cardboard to create a soft, difused glow. It would take 18 lighting engineers a week to achieve the same efect back in the UK. Later, a swarm of enraged bees decide to attach themselves to a branch above our heads. We retire to a safe distance and watch as Ashish and the team take turns in smoking them out… by setting fre to a cardboard box directly underneath. Fire hazard? Nah, it’ll be fne.
The panels now back in some semblance of the car they once belonged to, it’s time to hit them with a large hammer. Sadly, I forgot to pack one. Ashish marches of and returns with the head of a sledgehammer. But no handle. Cue more welding to attach a metal rod. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Against all odds, and without a bee sting or a single blunt force trauma incident to report, we get all the shots we need in the bag. Well, almost all – we’re still missing an actual working Ambassador to star in the opening scenes, a rather crucial omission. After scouring the classifeds for days, phoning every car rental company from Mumbai to Delhi and coming up dry, our cameraman makes noises about a family friend who owns one, but no word on whether he can make it down. With a hour of daylight left, we’re all but resigned to our fate, when a pristine white Ambassador trundles around the corner and beeps the horn. We and all the students we’ve roped in as extras cheer loudly in unison. Yep, the cameraman
“Anything’s possible if you’re prepared to go the extra mile”
knew his friend was coming all along, but wanted to string us along for comic efect.
The results? Well, you can watch the remake video (and a second flm looking at the brilliance of the Pambassador in more detail) for yourself over at topgear.com. As for the car’s fate, it’s currently being decided whether it stays in India as a showcase for the University, or returns to France to end up in La Reserve. I’m voting for the former, but either way the seed has been sown and ambition is high. Ashish tells me the student’s next project is turning a Vauxhall Corsa into an ode to the Lancia Stratos HF Zero.
It’s funny – this project started out all about the car; was the conversion even possible? How long would it take? Are we inadvertently about to kickstart a coach-built Ambassador craze? But it ended up being about the people. Ashish, Kushal, Parth and Sidharth, I salute your determination and skill. And for saying yes frst, then worrying about the how.