Even in its nascent stages, the revival of the small hot hatch - with battery power and modest weight - is to be celebrated. Cars like the Alpine A290 and Mini Cooper SE are already very good, and the return of the 208 GTI sounds like great news. Small, light, fast and fun is a recipe for entertainment, whatever the power source. Now we just need Citroen to join the fun. It has a long and storied history of GTs, GTIs, VTRs and VTSes and now there’s a new electric small car, the e-C3, which shares its STLA Smart Car Platform with the Fiat Grande Panda. An e-C3 VTS or GT or whatever doesn’t seem like the silliest stretch of the imagination; presumably the rest of the Stellantis brands will see how the e-208 GTI turns out before committing any further. But Citroen has been off the enthusiast radar for too long, probably since the old DS 3 Performance, and it would be great to have them back.
It remains so cherished because of cars like this Saxo VTR. Classic French pocket rockets weren’t complicated, or tremendously sophisticated, or expensive, but they delivered fun like little else. So people kept buying them - helped by free insurance and cheap finance back in the day - and Renault, Citroen and Peugeot kept making them. Until they didn’t. Or rather they did, but they were cars like the 207 GTI and C4 VTS. And it would have been better not to have bothered.
Anyway, this is not your average Saxo VTR. We all know what happened to most: thrashed from new by a first owner, who will have moved it on when they could get a Civic Type R. Thrashed by a second owner until they wanted something more practical. Thrashed by the next until they were told they needed something safer. Cherished (and thrashed some more) by a young PHer who can just about afford the first fast French fancy. Then probably scrapped, or crashed. Rinse and repeat.
These are old millennials’ RWD Escorts, those cheap and fun old cars that were traded for buttons when they were plentiful - and now worth a whole lot more with the supply dried up. Thanks to scrapping and crashing. This one, somehow, has just one previous owner for its entire 22 years, and considerably fewer than 50,000 miles. It’s borderline unprecedented for this kind of machine, the junior hot hatch that represented a stepping stone onto more serious machinery.
But somebody kept the VTR, and kept it nice. There’s not a modification to be seen, for starters: the crummy radio-CD player, a rear wiper the length of the wheelbase, an untouched parcel shelf and modest wheels are all present and correct. As an 03-registered car, it’s one of the last Saxos, and the MOT history is overwhelmingly green, again not another guarantee given build quality was hardly a strength.
Now it’s for sale at £8,495, or not a whole lot less than it would have cost in the early '00s. As back then, a 16-valve VTS remains the most desirable of the Saxos, but it feels like they’re even thinner on the ground these days. Even as a mere eight-valve, a VTR is going to be admired wherever it goes, and must surely be one of the cheapest classics to keep on the road. Maybe it’ll stick with the second owner for another couple of decades - Citroen might finally have decided to make another performance car by then…
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