Racing a Citroën C1 at Spa

Remember the Citroën 2CV racing series? It was inexpensive fun, but these days it’s not, which is why we now have the Citroën C1 Racing Club. As it says, this is a racing club using the French city car in three-door form. Modifications are very restricted so you’d imagine this would be a slow, dull car to compete in. You can imagine what you like.

Admittedly, the spec isn’t exactly BTCC style. Most things still have to be present and correct, like dashboard, radio, even the window winders, although you can remove any carpets and so on. The engine has to run the factory exhaust and you can’t mess with the intake either.

So that gives you 68bhp to dribble down to the front wheels via the five-speed box. You can play with the suspension a bit but basically you’re not going to be worrying about wheelspin too much. This sounds so boring that over 80 teams have already built or are building cars to race in the series. Yes, over 80.

There’s going to be a 24-hour race at Rockingham next year, with 70 C1s on the grid, and to give a flavour of what that’s like, we sent Matt Prior off to Spa Francorchamps to take part in a 24-hour race there – with 108 cars in total, about half of them C1s.

An F1 car can lap Spa in about 1min 46sec. The C1 takes about double that. You could be lapped by Lewis Hamilton in about one lap. Does that make it sound dull? Let’s ask Matt.

‘It doesn’t matter how thrilling a road car is, racing at Spa in the dark, even with 68bhp, is absolutely brilliant. I drove for two hours and, I kid you not, it was one of the very best drives I’ve ever had in 20 years of writing about cars.

‘It may not be very quick, but turning into Eau Rouge at 90mph in the dark and the rain, with wipers smearing water relatively ineffectively across windscreen oil and filth, only a few inches from another car, it all felt real enough to me.

‘Besides, the suspension changes mean that there's some chassis adjustability to the C1, too. The steering remains pretty uncommunicative, the brakes are superb, the gearshift light and the engine revvy. And even on a big, senior circuit, it's great fun.

‘There are places at Spa where you have to take a deep breath before turning in flat, places where you have to brake heavily, and places where - obviously - your foot is pressed so hard to the floor that you emerge from a stint with an aching right calf.’

By the end they finished in a reasonable midfield position. If a Citroën C1 racer can be that much fun on a monster circuit like Spa, just imagine how much fun it could be on a smaller circuit. Now you can start to imagine it.