What’s the connection between today’s shed and Ferrari? Shed is feeling slightly playful today having finally discovered an ointment that really does ease haemorrhoid sting, so he’s going to give you the answer to that one a bit later on.
At the beginning of this year, Shed brought us a smart 99,000-mile Citroen C2 by Loeb, a 2007 special edition VTS which marked the French ace’s return to Citroen’s works rally team. Shed can't remember how much that car was going for but thinks it must have been near the top end of our £1,500 qualifying limit.
Funny sort of thing, the C2 VTS. Its racy look wasn’t really matched by reality. The 16-valve 1.6 had 123hp at 6,500rpm but there was also nearly 1,100kg to shift and you needed two gearchanges to hit 60mph, which meant it took 8 and a bit seconds to get there. The steering wasn’t that great, nor were the electrics, and the cabin trim was as quiet as eighteen Lego bricks trapped in a kid’s drum. On the plus side there was decent grip and the C2 didn’t have the dephaser system that turned many a sporting Clio into a disposable item.
Today’s slightly cheaper C2 VTS doesn’t have any of that red car’s stickerage, which is a good thing. It’s two years older, which is a less good thing, but the mileage is considerably lower at 51,000. You’d think that would be another good thing until you looked at the MOT reports which give credence to the old adage that it’s not so much the mileage as the way you do the mileage.
In the case of this car we see a very slow annual accumulation of miles (reducing from around 3,000 pa to fewer than 600 in the last year) and a depressing pattern of fails just about every time it was taken in for a test. In all but one year (2012, when it was just the horn) it’s always been the car’s running gear – brakes, suspension and tyres – that’s let it down, indicating a ‘run it till it breaks’ approach to maintenance by whoever owned it.
The tester handling our Cit in July this year probably had to send off for another ink cartridge after printing out a long list of ‘repair immediately’ entries that were mainly to do with the rear brakes, but that also included a check engine warning light. It passed the retest in early August, all the major defects being sorted, but whoever owned it at the time crossed only two items off the equally long list of advisories. The next owner can do the same thing and ignore the remaining four (dodgy spare, worn offside rear brake disc, damaged nearside mirror and non-serious corrosion to the front subframe), but at some point, two of those are going to need doing.
There’s no mention in the ad of the cambelt having been changed, or of a service history. As we know, this type of vehicle tends to be popular with younger folk. Without wishing to tar all young ‘uns with the same brush, Shed has noticed a big change in car owning philosophies since he was a lad. Most motorists of his generation knew how to mend a fuse with a bit of silver paper from a fag packet, repair a sill with the runners and riders section of The Sporting Life, or fix a holed piston with a nice dod of solder on the day of sale.
It’s all changed now. For today’s fast-moving consumers, cars are no different to the mobile telephone. They either work, in which case fine, or they don’t, in which case get a new one. To Shed’s regret, everyday motoring skills, like plugging rad leaks with old bananas or annealing your own crankshaft at t’side o’ t’road, have been totally lost.
What else can we tell just by looking at this car? Well, the stains on the driver’s seat and the dog sticker in the back window tell you that it might need disinfecting, the bottle of water in the door pocket might suggest a healthy lifestyle or a less healthy need for post-rave rehydration, and the wrenched-off taillight lenses in the boot might be seen as confirmation of all your worst old-man prejudices.
Going back to Shed’s teaser at the beginning, the connection with Ferrari is that the C2 was designed by the same bloke who designed the 430 Scuderia, California, 599XX and 458 Italia, one Mr D Coco. You have to think that he was under orders when he was at Citroen because the C2’s front end is more reminiscent of the corrugated steel HY vans that you see dispensing £5 cups of coffee at festivals. You’d like to think that the C2’s more modern design would provide you with a bit more crash protection than the HY, or the famously flimsy Saxo.
1 / 4
