Inspired by Jonsey and his story and the lack of anything else to do I've been writing up some words with a vague idea for a series. Any way this is the intro..
no pics as its not a trip or anything as such, but hopefully it's readable.
Feel free to make like the literary critic...
The Unusual Car Club
The car rolls down the French autoroute heading south for the sun. It is mid-summer in 1979 and the family of five are heading to the Cote d’Azure on holiday, which for them means two weeks in a caravan on the coast midway between Frejus and St Tropez. Mythical St Tropez, jewel of the south coast and playground of the millionaires. In reality the coast road is dotted with camping and caravan parks and clogged with nose-to-tail traffic each and every day. However, it takes an adventurous two days to get there, they speak a different language and most importantly for the oldest son on board, the cars are all ones you don’t usually see at home.
In 1979 the British buy British cars, the French buy French cars and Japanese cars are still odd looking and tinny oddities, so a road trip down the A6 autoroute is a fabulous automotive tableaux you just don’t get to see in late seventies Britain. The French know how to keep a car as well. In the UK a dog may be “not just for Christmas” but in France a car really can be for life. This means the cars on view can just as easily date from the sixties as any point in the seventies. The days of buy-backs and scrappage are way in the future. In France if the engine fires up in the morning it’s all good to go. Dents just added character way before the retro term patina had come into vogue.
For the family in their car, heading south the road is wide open. The sun blazes down, air conditioning is just a futuristic dream, the choice is between the ineffectual car fan morosely blowing warm air from outside all around the inside, or the windows down and the same warm wind blowing in all by itself. It makes for a much more immediate experience than the current mobile cocoons that flow from place to place. The car they are in isn’t that old. It’s a 1973 Peugeot 304 estate with about fifty thousand miles on the clock, so six years old and by the standards of a 2019 car it really is only just run in. Even so there’s no guarantee that it will make a journey of eight hundred and twenty miles unscathed. It’s just been serviced and everything’s been checked, but it’s 1979 and cars don’t always work. What can you do? Just go. Go, and hope that everything keeps turning and everyone gets there in the end. Such are the things that turn a family trip into an adventure. A two-day adventure with nothing to do but look out of the window, watch France roll past and count the cars.
The Citroens are sharks, flashing through the traffic, headlamps blazing, indicators permanently on, pushing slower cars out of the way as they power past. Famously Jaguar used to remind owners that their cars were not as fast as a big Citroen DS. Too many engines exploding after extended autoroute pursuits. Renaults are dignified, rolling along often putting out smoke like Gauloise addicts, the Peugeots look undeniably French, quirky but basic. Famously you never, ever, see a Peugeot on the hard shoulder. Not ever. Peugeots can shrug off African deserts, they take twenty people at time from one end of a continent to the other. A French autoroute is nothing to a Peugeot.
The family have done this trip for several years in a row. It’s a ever changing mixture of excitement at being on holiday, of boredom as the kilometre boards showing the distance to Lyon tick slowly slowly down, of fractious heat as warm bottles of water are passed around the car and of many many rounds to many of “I Spy”. On the autoroute, as in town, French drivers seem like they are a different breed. They drive aggressively. They drive fast. Swerving from lane to lane, flashing their headlamps. For British drivers their car horn is as alien a device as a gun. Every car (like every American) has one, but really would you use it? What would the neighbours think? The French have no such reticence. Taking a second too long to move on from the lights? Honk! Overtaking too slowly and impeding their passage? Hooooonk! Tuesday? Hoooooonnnnkkk! The speed limit on the autoroute is 70 kilometres per hours, but never in the history of numbers does a figure appear to have been so thoroughly treated as merely advisory. The same goes for breaking distances. Every Frenchman is as convinced of the fact that the stopping distance of a fully loaded Renault 16 at one hundred kilometres per hour is fifteen inches as they are that French wine, food, women and fashion are the best in the world. The children in the back find this all very exhilarating, but the father insists on driving like a Brit. Full on mirror, signal manoeuvre, three car lengths between us and the car in front, even though the French simply treat this space as a convenient pull in. No amount of whining or pleading can induce exotic and brave French style driving. Of course, the fact that the car contains his entire family, his wife and three precious children, and air bags are a good twenty years away never crosses the children’s minds. Fathers are essentially dull and never seem to lose an opportunity to prove it.
And so the day winds on. The cars flash past, honking as required. Is every single car in France faster than us? For yes it is time to come clean, to throw aside the third person, it’s my family in the car, my dad at the wheel, my sister being so incredibly annoying that I fear my brother will actually burst into flames. I am thirteen, my brother is eleven and my sister nine. We three are all folded into the back of my fathers’ Harvest Gold Peugeot 304 Estate. Luggage and supplies for the five of us fill the boot. And the footwells. It is not luxury travel. One year we slept in the car, the back folded down, the luggage moved out of the way. The wooden runners that Peugeot so thoughtfully provided in the load area made for such an uncomfortable nights sleep that it’s flown unbidden to mind even as I type. I doubt the front was much more comfortable. The front seats fold down only so far. They are substantially not beds.
The Peugeot was one in a line of French cars that punctuated our growing up. There were Peugeots; two 304s and a 504, Renaults, a 12 Estate followed by a 20 TS hatchback, and once a Citroen GS descended from the clouds to grace us with its ethereal presence for a couple of years. My father had a “complex” relationship with the GS. Of course it was fabulous. It was a Citroen before they became normal cars. It rode on hydraulics, rising and falling of its own free will. It was air cooled, no stupid radiator topping up for us! The dashboard looked more similar to that of my other passion, the Starship Enterprise, than to that of any normal cars. And yet my father took to leaving it unlocked in Sainsbuy’s car park with the keys in the ignition. I suppose the fact that it always remained un-stolen was a clue that being financially responsible for it may not have been the smooth ride that simply being driven around in it was. The only times I remember my father’s desire to own French cars being thwarted was a brief dalliance with two Austin Maxi’s. This was enough to reinforce his belief that there was nothing of interest here, and the parade of Gallic metal continued through all the time we were growing up.
Because everyone around us was very sensibly driving sensible British cars in a very sensible manner, the yearly holiday was the only time that our car blended in. Of course the British number plates and the white GB sticker gave the game away long before the natives could spot what side of the car the steering wheel was on, but this simply gave them plenty of extra time to prepare their honking arm for strenuous and verbose use. The car itself however was at home, even if it must have been staining at the leash to be driven like its wilder French relatives.
Which brings us back to the Autoroute du Soliel, the Motorway to the Sun as the A6 was known. (Do any British motorways have such evocative names. Spaghetti Junction isn’t even a real name, it’s a nick-name. The M4 could be the Autoroute du Pluie given its final destination in Wales, but it’s hardly evocative).
As previously noted, the physical realities of a two-day drive to the south of France in 1979 are far harsher than those experienced when undertaking the same trip today. With a fair wind and a broad disregard for speed cameras a mid-sized executive saloon or even a family car could manage the trip in one shot. Head for the ferry, meal on board if you are feeling brave or masochistic, top up the fuel, head down and it’s Café au Lait with the billionaires in St Tropez harbour before you know it. Guaranteed. Zero chance of breakdown. And you probably won’t even remember the journey down as you can watch movies on your iPad and keep up to date with FaceBook all the way there, (data roaming charges may apply). Which means today’s children never have to look out of the car window for hours at a time, but even if they did, all the cars are the same now anyway. The French now drive exactly what the British drive. The Germans do the same and the Japanese have come a long, long way from 1979.
I, however, did have to look out of the window. For hours on end. I soon noticed that the French have different shaped electricity pylons to us, but that information only gets you so far in life, and not even that far in a two-day car journey. The motorway bridges it turned out were colour coded so you could try to guess what colour bridge would come up next. Blue and white stripes? Red and white? Yellow and white? Of course it turned out that the bridges colours simply ran through the same order, repeating, but for a while it was fun to notice this before my siblings. As a betting game you would never get rich on it. Every so often though, something happened. For sure, a Citroen CX or Peugeot 604 or even a Renault 20 would regularly blast past at some obviously insane velocity, but sometimes so would something altogether smaller. A lot smaller.
It’s an article of car faith to a child that big cars are faster than small ones. It makes sense. Big car, big engine, more power, more speed. I knew that Mini’s were quick, but they weren’t actually fast. Nimble for sure, but not motorway quick. You don’t do one hundred and ten all day in a mini. If you wanted to go fast you could buy a Jaaaag, or a Ford Granada, both of which my fathers friend did. We however had a middling car, it was middling fast. At least in the hands of someone other than boring old Dad it could theoretically be. The French however had a different view on the matter of vehicular top speed. Like their unshakable faith in stopping distances the French also believed that the top speed of any car was simply a matter of how fast the driver needed to go at that particular time. The practical result of this was that even tiny, old, ratty cars seemed able to generate the same ridiculous amounts of speed as bigger cars, which was while a Citroen DS that was in the process of gliding past us I was amazed to see a small box on wheels demand with frantic flashes of its headlamps to be let past and to be let past right, this, minute.
The small box turned out to bear the Peugeot lion emblem on its front grill. It was the smaller brother to our 304, a 104.
When Peugeot introduced the 104 to the world in 1972, no-one noticed. And this was entirely unsurprising as it was from the ground up unremarkable. It’s one stand-out feature was that despite Renault having already shown the world that small five door cars needed a hatchback, Peugeot sent the 104 out into the world with four doors and a tiny boot. A year later they fixed this and everyone was able to forget it existed. In a similar way to the automatically memory erasing monsters from Dr Who, as soon as a Peugeot 104 left your field of vision it erased itself from your mind. Which made it slightly difficult to sell. Mechanically the car was actually very up to date, advanced even. The fully aluminium engine ran its four speed gearbox in the sump to save space, like the BMC Mini, and was laid back in the engine bay to reduce height. The suspension was all round excellent, fully independent providing a very comfortable ride in the traditional French floaty manner. Despite its bland looks the 104 began to pick up sales. In France only of course.
Peugeot had a long and well-respected history of taking their slightly frumpy saloons and creating much more exciting coupe and cabriolet models from them. The ultra-boxy 204 and 304 saloons were evolved into a very pretty coupé, with a long sloping rear window and two long doors and then an even prettier cabriolet which brought cheap stylish open top motoring to the masses, while the bigger 504, which was so indestructible that it would certainly have been the car of choice for any cockroaches that had survived nuclear Armageddon and evolved driving skills, but was realistically had looks only its mother could love begat an elegant and refined coupé and a convertible of such stunning beauty and grace that it became the Audrey Hepburn of the automotive world. It was so stylish that when Peugeot resurrected the idea in 2019 for their e-Legend concept car they featured a 504 cabriolet in almost every publicity shot. A device designed to convince people that the modern car was in some way as stylish as its classic forbearer but which merely served to highlight the modern versions styling deficiencies. The 504 was an absolute stunner of a car in both coupé and cabriolet forms. This impressive history of model evolution meant that in 1974 when Peugeot announced that the 104 would also become a coupé, great things were expected, especially since the design was handed over to the same Italians that made the 504 so pretty, Pininnfarina. When it arrived the 104 coupé was definitely… short.
When car manufactures make a coupé there a tool-kit of tricks they can use to help generate the required sporting image. Two doors of course, coupé owners do not traditionally worry about adult passengers, or even children, especially children, getting into the back. Low is also generally good. Most coupés benefit from the roof getting closer to the floor, as well as it curving down at the back in order to remind any rear seat passengers that have made it inside why they really shouldn’t be there in the first place. Peugeot elected to coupéise the 104 by essentially taking a large saw to everything behind the front doors. The result was a car that looks as if the people designing the back end had simply not turned up for work, there really wasn’t much of a back. A big flat rear hatch covered the hole left by the removal of the rear two doors. The roof didn’t so much swoop as just… stop. The traditional lack of rear passenger space was thus effectively created but Peugeot did put a rear bench seat in, more as a challenge than in any expectation of use. The front end was left entirely untouched. The new three door coupé range was given the appellation “Z” to differentiate it from its more useful cousins and Peugeot launched it onto the waiting French public.
Maybe you are now picturing the 104 coupé based on the description of the above paragraph. Maybe you are comparing it to the description of the 304 and 504. Maybe you aren’t filled with confidence in the new arrival. The only thing you can say about Peugeots method was that, bizarrely, it worked. The original car was modern, efficient, comfortable. It was a lot of very useful things, but it was absolutely not stylish. Practical rarely is. Creating the coupé added in a pile of gallic character. Removing a quarter of the car added an extra helping of attitude. It fizzed. It was perky and alert. The four wheels now right at each corner imparted energy to it. The flat sloping rear looked like it was pushing the car along. The relatively longer front made it look like there was a lot of engine for such a small space. It looked like it might be a fun. That’s Fun with a capital F. The new Z style cars were a big hit, just not in Britain of course.
The small boxy shape behind the overtaking Citroen DS was of course a 104 coupé. By this time Peugeot had managed to squeeze a 1360cc engine into the front in replacement of the original 1124cc. The new bigger engine pushed out more power but of course in accordance with the French law of car top speed resulted in exactly the same terminal velocity. At this moment the 104 drivers’ need to go faster was manifestly greater than that of the CX driver. This meant that his car was correspondingly faster despite the huge difference in engine size. The CX driver simply needed to get out of the way. Luckily my father had left the required three car spaces between us and the car in front, which the CX promptly pulled into and the tiny 104 flashed off into the distance it’s engine buzzing with the furious sound of a million highly trained and very angry assault wasps. Events like that can be a revelation to a young boy that loves cars.
And so, a sort of game began to develop although how it started and exactly why have become blurred by time. As we puttered along at the indicated seventy kph both me and my dad kept an eye out for any more of the tiny coupés. Each time one zipped past it became remarked upon. There was speculation about maybe trying to catch one although even at thirteen I realised this was just a heat-induced fantasy. The tiny cars did however become insolubly associated with holidays, France and motorway journeys.
Back home in the UK, time passed. It was now the mid-eighties. This meant I was now seventeen. And still mad about cars obviously. At this exact point, early in 1983 the time when I can actually get behind the wheel of car myself is rapidly approaching. Roll on August, roll on my seventeenth birthday. The realities of owning a car as a seventeen year old school-boy meant that the only way I was going to be able to get behind the wheel was to share my Mums car, which at this time was a white Renault 5. Yes, even my mother had to comply with the French car owning rules of the house, although if she had been given a wardrobe on wheels she would have been happy. My mother was as much not a car person as my father and I were. As an adult looking back and having been through the same life stages myself as my parents I can see now how much leeway she must have granted my dad and his car habits.
The trading of stocks and shares has been revolutionised by computerised buying and selling. Company stock can be bought and sold trillions of times a minute. If my Dad could have changed cars this fast that’s exactly what he would have done. Sometimes it seemed like the only limiting factor on the rapidity with which cars came and went was that in pre internet days you had to wait a week for the local paper or the Autotrader to come out. For goodness sake, if you advertised in the latter you even had to wait for a person to come round and photograph your car for the advert.
Sometimes it takes years and distance to see the ways in which your parents loved each other.
Eventually time rolled by and I became seventeen. I became a driver and I was able to drive the Renault 5. I took lessons in the little car. It’s 850cc engine was deemed friendly enough to limit any potential hazard, although with the roads a bare fraction as congested as they are today the overall potential for collision was inordinately reduced. Which was a good thing as the Renault was probably as crash worthy as a crisp packet. And if that metaphor needs a visual helper then imagine treading on a bag of cheese and onion and then opening the packet. Yes older cars really were not very safe at all. The Renault 5 was very, very French. It looked French, it felt French and it rode French. The effects of taking a corner at even medium speed would still be felt via the gently oscillating body roll as you got out of the car on the drive way hours later. The designers of the tiny engine had for some unknown but very French reasons elected to place the gearbox at the very front of the engine as far away from the gear stick as possible. In order to connect the two items they decided to route the connecting rod across the top of the engine, thus exiting it through the middle of the dashboard rather that along the bottom and through the floor. As a consequence the gear shifter protruded from the dashboard as if someone had shoved an umbrella through the dash leaving only the curved handle protruding. The car was knick-named Hannibal as it seems to be able to eventually get anywhere.
It was a shared car of course and much to my disgust this meant that every so often my mother needed it to drive for some entirely unimportant and selfish reason such as going to work or even taking my brother or sister somewhere. On such occasions I was required to walk to wherever I wanted to go. At that time one of my friends lived about 5 miles away in the next suburb over. The walk there and back didn’t seem like a chore and I remember I used to undertake it (and visa-versa to be fair) several times over a week-end. One section of the walk took me along a relatively affluent suburban street. The houses were sunk slightly below the road level for some reason, so the driveways sloped down to the garages that every semi detached home had. Being 1983, not every house had multiple cars on the drive, but one did. I may or may not have noticed it the first time I walked past it but it can’t have been many trips before it caught my eye, It was dulled with rust, it was shabby and obviously unloved, it was Harvest Gold and it was small and boxy.
Peugeot manufactured the 104 for sixteen years although it was only available in the UK for eleven of these. The brand new 205 committed fratricide on its older sibling in every market apart from France where the 104 lived on in Style Z form as a super cheap runabout. During those sixteen years Peugeot shifted 1.6 million 104s, and 345,000 of those were coupés. The vast majority of these were sold in France, although the Belgians and the Dutch turned out to have a soft spot for a 104 as well. In Britain it was as unloved as every other Peugeot. The numbers sold were tiny and of that small cohort of cars only a minority were coupés. Not every coupé was equal either. Peugeot supplied a somewhat bewildering range of engines and trim specifications form 950 to 1360cc. The could follow a long and complex list, or maybe a spreadsheet, but no, all we really need to concentrate on here are two letters, ZS.
The ZS was “the sporty one” in an age when sporty was entirely relative. 1124cc, 55BHP, happy go lucky handling. It was fun, it buzzed along but it was no ball of fire. UK cars seemed to come without the French spec infinite speed ability. In 1979 Peugeot changed the 1.1 motor for a 1.3 which upped the thrills to 80BHP. They had a think, over presumably Gauloise and Pernod, as they stereotypically do, and added quite the nattiest set of alloys wheels, and some stripes. The British ignored what had almost inadvertently become one of the very first hot hatches. What all this meant however was that here, within a few miles of my very own home, was a Peugeot 104 ZS. The car from the motorways of France, the giant killing buzz box of a smaller childs’ remembered holidays.
I’m going to make some stuff up here, because I simply don’t remember. The details are not important anyway. I know I must have wanted it. Really, really wanted it. I probably walked past it over and over again. I know it never moved. I also know I must have driven my father mad constantly going on about the car sat barely a stones throw form our house because that’s what I do when I get over excited. I would have convinced myself that I had to have it. That not having it was inconceivable. And so on, and on and on…
no pics as its not a trip or anything as such, but hopefully it's readable.
Feel free to make like the literary critic...
The Unusual Car Club
The car rolls down the French autoroute heading south for the sun. It is mid-summer in 1979 and the family of five are heading to the Cote d’Azure on holiday, which for them means two weeks in a caravan on the coast midway between Frejus and St Tropez. Mythical St Tropez, jewel of the south coast and playground of the millionaires. In reality the coast road is dotted with camping and caravan parks and clogged with nose-to-tail traffic each and every day. However, it takes an adventurous two days to get there, they speak a different language and most importantly for the oldest son on board, the cars are all ones you don’t usually see at home.
In 1979 the British buy British cars, the French buy French cars and Japanese cars are still odd looking and tinny oddities, so a road trip down the A6 autoroute is a fabulous automotive tableaux you just don’t get to see in late seventies Britain. The French know how to keep a car as well. In the UK a dog may be “not just for Christmas” but in France a car really can be for life. This means the cars on view can just as easily date from the sixties as any point in the seventies. The days of buy-backs and scrappage are way in the future. In France if the engine fires up in the morning it’s all good to go. Dents just added character way before the retro term patina had come into vogue.
For the family in their car, heading south the road is wide open. The sun blazes down, air conditioning is just a futuristic dream, the choice is between the ineffectual car fan morosely blowing warm air from outside all around the inside, or the windows down and the same warm wind blowing in all by itself. It makes for a much more immediate experience than the current mobile cocoons that flow from place to place. The car they are in isn’t that old. It’s a 1973 Peugeot 304 estate with about fifty thousand miles on the clock, so six years old and by the standards of a 2019 car it really is only just run in. Even so there’s no guarantee that it will make a journey of eight hundred and twenty miles unscathed. It’s just been serviced and everything’s been checked, but it’s 1979 and cars don’t always work. What can you do? Just go. Go, and hope that everything keeps turning and everyone gets there in the end. Such are the things that turn a family trip into an adventure. A two-day adventure with nothing to do but look out of the window, watch France roll past and count the cars.
The Citroens are sharks, flashing through the traffic, headlamps blazing, indicators permanently on, pushing slower cars out of the way as they power past. Famously Jaguar used to remind owners that their cars were not as fast as a big Citroen DS. Too many engines exploding after extended autoroute pursuits. Renaults are dignified, rolling along often putting out smoke like Gauloise addicts, the Peugeots look undeniably French, quirky but basic. Famously you never, ever, see a Peugeot on the hard shoulder. Not ever. Peugeots can shrug off African deserts, they take twenty people at time from one end of a continent to the other. A French autoroute is nothing to a Peugeot.
The family have done this trip for several years in a row. It’s a ever changing mixture of excitement at being on holiday, of boredom as the kilometre boards showing the distance to Lyon tick slowly slowly down, of fractious heat as warm bottles of water are passed around the car and of many many rounds to many of “I Spy”. On the autoroute, as in town, French drivers seem like they are a different breed. They drive aggressively. They drive fast. Swerving from lane to lane, flashing their headlamps. For British drivers their car horn is as alien a device as a gun. Every car (like every American) has one, but really would you use it? What would the neighbours think? The French have no such reticence. Taking a second too long to move on from the lights? Honk! Overtaking too slowly and impeding their passage? Hooooonk! Tuesday? Hoooooonnnnkkk! The speed limit on the autoroute is 70 kilometres per hours, but never in the history of numbers does a figure appear to have been so thoroughly treated as merely advisory. The same goes for breaking distances. Every Frenchman is as convinced of the fact that the stopping distance of a fully loaded Renault 16 at one hundred kilometres per hour is fifteen inches as they are that French wine, food, women and fashion are the best in the world. The children in the back find this all very exhilarating, but the father insists on driving like a Brit. Full on mirror, signal manoeuvre, three car lengths between us and the car in front, even though the French simply treat this space as a convenient pull in. No amount of whining or pleading can induce exotic and brave French style driving. Of course, the fact that the car contains his entire family, his wife and three precious children, and air bags are a good twenty years away never crosses the children’s minds. Fathers are essentially dull and never seem to lose an opportunity to prove it.
And so the day winds on. The cars flash past, honking as required. Is every single car in France faster than us? For yes it is time to come clean, to throw aside the third person, it’s my family in the car, my dad at the wheel, my sister being so incredibly annoying that I fear my brother will actually burst into flames. I am thirteen, my brother is eleven and my sister nine. We three are all folded into the back of my fathers’ Harvest Gold Peugeot 304 Estate. Luggage and supplies for the five of us fill the boot. And the footwells. It is not luxury travel. One year we slept in the car, the back folded down, the luggage moved out of the way. The wooden runners that Peugeot so thoughtfully provided in the load area made for such an uncomfortable nights sleep that it’s flown unbidden to mind even as I type. I doubt the front was much more comfortable. The front seats fold down only so far. They are substantially not beds.
The Peugeot was one in a line of French cars that punctuated our growing up. There were Peugeots; two 304s and a 504, Renaults, a 12 Estate followed by a 20 TS hatchback, and once a Citroen GS descended from the clouds to grace us with its ethereal presence for a couple of years. My father had a “complex” relationship with the GS. Of course it was fabulous. It was a Citroen before they became normal cars. It rode on hydraulics, rising and falling of its own free will. It was air cooled, no stupid radiator topping up for us! The dashboard looked more similar to that of my other passion, the Starship Enterprise, than to that of any normal cars. And yet my father took to leaving it unlocked in Sainsbuy’s car park with the keys in the ignition. I suppose the fact that it always remained un-stolen was a clue that being financially responsible for it may not have been the smooth ride that simply being driven around in it was. The only times I remember my father’s desire to own French cars being thwarted was a brief dalliance with two Austin Maxi’s. This was enough to reinforce his belief that there was nothing of interest here, and the parade of Gallic metal continued through all the time we were growing up.
Because everyone around us was very sensibly driving sensible British cars in a very sensible manner, the yearly holiday was the only time that our car blended in. Of course the British number plates and the white GB sticker gave the game away long before the natives could spot what side of the car the steering wheel was on, but this simply gave them plenty of extra time to prepare their honking arm for strenuous and verbose use. The car itself however was at home, even if it must have been staining at the leash to be driven like its wilder French relatives.
Which brings us back to the Autoroute du Soliel, the Motorway to the Sun as the A6 was known. (Do any British motorways have such evocative names. Spaghetti Junction isn’t even a real name, it’s a nick-name. The M4 could be the Autoroute du Pluie given its final destination in Wales, but it’s hardly evocative).
As previously noted, the physical realities of a two-day drive to the south of France in 1979 are far harsher than those experienced when undertaking the same trip today. With a fair wind and a broad disregard for speed cameras a mid-sized executive saloon or even a family car could manage the trip in one shot. Head for the ferry, meal on board if you are feeling brave or masochistic, top up the fuel, head down and it’s Café au Lait with the billionaires in St Tropez harbour before you know it. Guaranteed. Zero chance of breakdown. And you probably won’t even remember the journey down as you can watch movies on your iPad and keep up to date with FaceBook all the way there, (data roaming charges may apply). Which means today’s children never have to look out of the car window for hours at a time, but even if they did, all the cars are the same now anyway. The French now drive exactly what the British drive. The Germans do the same and the Japanese have come a long, long way from 1979.
I, however, did have to look out of the window. For hours on end. I soon noticed that the French have different shaped electricity pylons to us, but that information only gets you so far in life, and not even that far in a two-day car journey. The motorway bridges it turned out were colour coded so you could try to guess what colour bridge would come up next. Blue and white stripes? Red and white? Yellow and white? Of course it turned out that the bridges colours simply ran through the same order, repeating, but for a while it was fun to notice this before my siblings. As a betting game you would never get rich on it. Every so often though, something happened. For sure, a Citroen CX or Peugeot 604 or even a Renault 20 would regularly blast past at some obviously insane velocity, but sometimes so would something altogether smaller. A lot smaller.
It’s an article of car faith to a child that big cars are faster than small ones. It makes sense. Big car, big engine, more power, more speed. I knew that Mini’s were quick, but they weren’t actually fast. Nimble for sure, but not motorway quick. You don’t do one hundred and ten all day in a mini. If you wanted to go fast you could buy a Jaaaag, or a Ford Granada, both of which my fathers friend did. We however had a middling car, it was middling fast. At least in the hands of someone other than boring old Dad it could theoretically be. The French however had a different view on the matter of vehicular top speed. Like their unshakable faith in stopping distances the French also believed that the top speed of any car was simply a matter of how fast the driver needed to go at that particular time. The practical result of this was that even tiny, old, ratty cars seemed able to generate the same ridiculous amounts of speed as bigger cars, which was while a Citroen DS that was in the process of gliding past us I was amazed to see a small box on wheels demand with frantic flashes of its headlamps to be let past and to be let past right, this, minute.
The small box turned out to bear the Peugeot lion emblem on its front grill. It was the smaller brother to our 304, a 104.
When Peugeot introduced the 104 to the world in 1972, no-one noticed. And this was entirely unsurprising as it was from the ground up unremarkable. It’s one stand-out feature was that despite Renault having already shown the world that small five door cars needed a hatchback, Peugeot sent the 104 out into the world with four doors and a tiny boot. A year later they fixed this and everyone was able to forget it existed. In a similar way to the automatically memory erasing monsters from Dr Who, as soon as a Peugeot 104 left your field of vision it erased itself from your mind. Which made it slightly difficult to sell. Mechanically the car was actually very up to date, advanced even. The fully aluminium engine ran its four speed gearbox in the sump to save space, like the BMC Mini, and was laid back in the engine bay to reduce height. The suspension was all round excellent, fully independent providing a very comfortable ride in the traditional French floaty manner. Despite its bland looks the 104 began to pick up sales. In France only of course.
Peugeot had a long and well-respected history of taking their slightly frumpy saloons and creating much more exciting coupe and cabriolet models from them. The ultra-boxy 204 and 304 saloons were evolved into a very pretty coupé, with a long sloping rear window and two long doors and then an even prettier cabriolet which brought cheap stylish open top motoring to the masses, while the bigger 504, which was so indestructible that it would certainly have been the car of choice for any cockroaches that had survived nuclear Armageddon and evolved driving skills, but was realistically had looks only its mother could love begat an elegant and refined coupé and a convertible of such stunning beauty and grace that it became the Audrey Hepburn of the automotive world. It was so stylish that when Peugeot resurrected the idea in 2019 for their e-Legend concept car they featured a 504 cabriolet in almost every publicity shot. A device designed to convince people that the modern car was in some way as stylish as its classic forbearer but which merely served to highlight the modern versions styling deficiencies. The 504 was an absolute stunner of a car in both coupé and cabriolet forms. This impressive history of model evolution meant that in 1974 when Peugeot announced that the 104 would also become a coupé, great things were expected, especially since the design was handed over to the same Italians that made the 504 so pretty, Pininnfarina. When it arrived the 104 coupé was definitely… short.
When car manufactures make a coupé there a tool-kit of tricks they can use to help generate the required sporting image. Two doors of course, coupé owners do not traditionally worry about adult passengers, or even children, especially children, getting into the back. Low is also generally good. Most coupés benefit from the roof getting closer to the floor, as well as it curving down at the back in order to remind any rear seat passengers that have made it inside why they really shouldn’t be there in the first place. Peugeot elected to coupéise the 104 by essentially taking a large saw to everything behind the front doors. The result was a car that looks as if the people designing the back end had simply not turned up for work, there really wasn’t much of a back. A big flat rear hatch covered the hole left by the removal of the rear two doors. The roof didn’t so much swoop as just… stop. The traditional lack of rear passenger space was thus effectively created but Peugeot did put a rear bench seat in, more as a challenge than in any expectation of use. The front end was left entirely untouched. The new three door coupé range was given the appellation “Z” to differentiate it from its more useful cousins and Peugeot launched it onto the waiting French public.
Maybe you are now picturing the 104 coupé based on the description of the above paragraph. Maybe you are comparing it to the description of the 304 and 504. Maybe you aren’t filled with confidence in the new arrival. The only thing you can say about Peugeots method was that, bizarrely, it worked. The original car was modern, efficient, comfortable. It was a lot of very useful things, but it was absolutely not stylish. Practical rarely is. Creating the coupé added in a pile of gallic character. Removing a quarter of the car added an extra helping of attitude. It fizzed. It was perky and alert. The four wheels now right at each corner imparted energy to it. The flat sloping rear looked like it was pushing the car along. The relatively longer front made it look like there was a lot of engine for such a small space. It looked like it might be a fun. That’s Fun with a capital F. The new Z style cars were a big hit, just not in Britain of course.
The small boxy shape behind the overtaking Citroen DS was of course a 104 coupé. By this time Peugeot had managed to squeeze a 1360cc engine into the front in replacement of the original 1124cc. The new bigger engine pushed out more power but of course in accordance with the French law of car top speed resulted in exactly the same terminal velocity. At this moment the 104 drivers’ need to go faster was manifestly greater than that of the CX driver. This meant that his car was correspondingly faster despite the huge difference in engine size. The CX driver simply needed to get out of the way. Luckily my father had left the required three car spaces between us and the car in front, which the CX promptly pulled into and the tiny 104 flashed off into the distance it’s engine buzzing with the furious sound of a million highly trained and very angry assault wasps. Events like that can be a revelation to a young boy that loves cars.
And so, a sort of game began to develop although how it started and exactly why have become blurred by time. As we puttered along at the indicated seventy kph both me and my dad kept an eye out for any more of the tiny coupés. Each time one zipped past it became remarked upon. There was speculation about maybe trying to catch one although even at thirteen I realised this was just a heat-induced fantasy. The tiny cars did however become insolubly associated with holidays, France and motorway journeys.
Back home in the UK, time passed. It was now the mid-eighties. This meant I was now seventeen. And still mad about cars obviously. At this exact point, early in 1983 the time when I can actually get behind the wheel of car myself is rapidly approaching. Roll on August, roll on my seventeenth birthday. The realities of owning a car as a seventeen year old school-boy meant that the only way I was going to be able to get behind the wheel was to share my Mums car, which at this time was a white Renault 5. Yes, even my mother had to comply with the French car owning rules of the house, although if she had been given a wardrobe on wheels she would have been happy. My mother was as much not a car person as my father and I were. As an adult looking back and having been through the same life stages myself as my parents I can see now how much leeway she must have granted my dad and his car habits.
The trading of stocks and shares has been revolutionised by computerised buying and selling. Company stock can be bought and sold trillions of times a minute. If my Dad could have changed cars this fast that’s exactly what he would have done. Sometimes it seemed like the only limiting factor on the rapidity with which cars came and went was that in pre internet days you had to wait a week for the local paper or the Autotrader to come out. For goodness sake, if you advertised in the latter you even had to wait for a person to come round and photograph your car for the advert.
Sometimes it takes years and distance to see the ways in which your parents loved each other.
Eventually time rolled by and I became seventeen. I became a driver and I was able to drive the Renault 5. I took lessons in the little car. It’s 850cc engine was deemed friendly enough to limit any potential hazard, although with the roads a bare fraction as congested as they are today the overall potential for collision was inordinately reduced. Which was a good thing as the Renault was probably as crash worthy as a crisp packet. And if that metaphor needs a visual helper then imagine treading on a bag of cheese and onion and then opening the packet. Yes older cars really were not very safe at all. The Renault 5 was very, very French. It looked French, it felt French and it rode French. The effects of taking a corner at even medium speed would still be felt via the gently oscillating body roll as you got out of the car on the drive way hours later. The designers of the tiny engine had for some unknown but very French reasons elected to place the gearbox at the very front of the engine as far away from the gear stick as possible. In order to connect the two items they decided to route the connecting rod across the top of the engine, thus exiting it through the middle of the dashboard rather that along the bottom and through the floor. As a consequence the gear shifter protruded from the dashboard as if someone had shoved an umbrella through the dash leaving only the curved handle protruding. The car was knick-named Hannibal as it seems to be able to eventually get anywhere.
It was a shared car of course and much to my disgust this meant that every so often my mother needed it to drive for some entirely unimportant and selfish reason such as going to work or even taking my brother or sister somewhere. On such occasions I was required to walk to wherever I wanted to go. At that time one of my friends lived about 5 miles away in the next suburb over. The walk there and back didn’t seem like a chore and I remember I used to undertake it (and visa-versa to be fair) several times over a week-end. One section of the walk took me along a relatively affluent suburban street. The houses were sunk slightly below the road level for some reason, so the driveways sloped down to the garages that every semi detached home had. Being 1983, not every house had multiple cars on the drive, but one did. I may or may not have noticed it the first time I walked past it but it can’t have been many trips before it caught my eye, It was dulled with rust, it was shabby and obviously unloved, it was Harvest Gold and it was small and boxy.
Peugeot manufactured the 104 for sixteen years although it was only available in the UK for eleven of these. The brand new 205 committed fratricide on its older sibling in every market apart from France where the 104 lived on in Style Z form as a super cheap runabout. During those sixteen years Peugeot shifted 1.6 million 104s, and 345,000 of those were coupés. The vast majority of these were sold in France, although the Belgians and the Dutch turned out to have a soft spot for a 104 as well. In Britain it was as unloved as every other Peugeot. The numbers sold were tiny and of that small cohort of cars only a minority were coupés. Not every coupé was equal either. Peugeot supplied a somewhat bewildering range of engines and trim specifications form 950 to 1360cc. The could follow a long and complex list, or maybe a spreadsheet, but no, all we really need to concentrate on here are two letters, ZS.
The ZS was “the sporty one” in an age when sporty was entirely relative. 1124cc, 55BHP, happy go lucky handling. It was fun, it buzzed along but it was no ball of fire. UK cars seemed to come without the French spec infinite speed ability. In 1979 Peugeot changed the 1.1 motor for a 1.3 which upped the thrills to 80BHP. They had a think, over presumably Gauloise and Pernod, as they stereotypically do, and added quite the nattiest set of alloys wheels, and some stripes. The British ignored what had almost inadvertently become one of the very first hot hatches. What all this meant however was that here, within a few miles of my very own home, was a Peugeot 104 ZS. The car from the motorways of France, the giant killing buzz box of a smaller childs’ remembered holidays.
I’m going to make some stuff up here, because I simply don’t remember. The details are not important anyway. I know I must have wanted it. Really, really wanted it. I probably walked past it over and over again. I know it never moved. I also know I must have driven my father mad constantly going on about the car sat barely a stones throw form our house because that’s what I do when I get over excited. I would have convinced myself that I had to have it. That not having it was inconceivable. And so on, and on and on…
