Peugeot 106 Rallye
After a stint of piling on the miles, the Rallye gets a well-earned rest – thanks to an unusual stand-in
IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE I LAST PUT finger to keyboard on the Rallye, and the rollercoaster that was 2020 means its latest appearance comes after an unexpected flurry of activity. Put simply, my small, French, late’90s homologation special bought for weekend blasts spent two or three months acting as my primary mode of transportation.
Aside from everything else, this has had quite an impact on the odometer. In the car’s previous report in June 2020 the odo was reading 113,976, which meant I’d put only around 3000 miles on the car in three full years. Fast-forward a few months and that number read 116,299 – 2323 miles greater.
It turns out that piling miles on a tiny car with little in the way of modern equipment, no power steering and no air conditioning isn’t the hardship you might expect, even throughout those particularly warm weeks we got late in the summer. One of those days was spent whizzing around Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire in an appropriately socially distanced convoy with Aston Parrott and a few other colleagues old and new, sweltering windows-down in 30-plus degree heat, and the Pug looked a whole lot better at the end of it than I did, even with the thick layer of unfortunate bugs shotgunned across its nose.
It was just another reminder that cars are meant to be used. They’re some of the most remarkable consumer products on the planet, designed to operate in a multitude of conditions and by customers of wildly varying skill levels, and they’re expected to do so for tens of years and tens of thousands of miles. Driving them doesn’t hurt them. It’s what they’re designed for, and that applies as much to a small, sporty hatchback with more than two decades on its logbook as it does a zero-miles family wagon rolling fresh from the showroom floor.
All that said, I wasn’t going to continue running the Peugeot in this manner, largely because winter was fast approaching and the idea of running the Rallye through rivers of brine made my skin crawl. The car is largely rust-free and I’d quite like to keep it that way. The other, admittedly more easily remedied issue was that back in May I put the car on a classic insurance policy with a 3000-mile limit, meaning I had 677 miles left to last me another six months.
The solution, as all card-carrying petrolheads will know, was to acquire another car and subject that to the salty torture instead. Many were considered, but fortune shone a light on me when Porsche PR man Rory Lumsdon mentioned a friend of his was offloading a Toyota Paseo he no longer needed (small 1990s coupe, for those currently drawing a blank), and if I made a donation to his chosen charity it could be mine. So I did, it was, and fresh from its first service in god-knows how long it’s now dutifully ticking up the miles, while the Peugeot finally gets to relax again in my garage.
‘The idea of running the Rallye through rivers of brine made my skin crawl’
Date acquired August 2017 Total mileage 116,299 Mileage this month 432 Costs this month £0 mpg this month 42.5