Peugeot 205 Rallye (1988 - 1992): a featherweight homologation hatch
Most modern high-performance cars struggle when it comes to the UK’s narrow, gnarly back-roads. What’s needed here is something small, light, French and feisty… like a 205 Rallye
The window is down by necessity. There’s a lot of glass in this car and seemingly every square inch of it is gathering the sun’s rays and focusing them directly onto my torso. The rush of air is welcome, then, but there are other benefits too, such as unfettered access to the snorting of a pair of twin-choke carbs bouncing off the scenery just to my left. And to my right, on this single-track road.
The carburettors are competing in volume with a rasping exhaust note, the same way the lingering smell of hot oil and vaporised V‑Power is competing with the privet and brambles and weeds in the hedgerows either side. With a steering wheel constantly writhing between my hands and a plastic dashboard rattling away like a Ming vase in a Yodel van, there aren’t many senses left unassaulted.
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There’s also some unfamiliarity muddling the grey matter, but that’s exactly why I’m here. To experience something new. Partly the car, but mostly the roads. The car is a 1991 Peugeot 205 Rallye, a very deliberate choice for my mission, while the broken and bumpy asphalt comes courtesy of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire.
It’s evo’s usual stomping ground, but also it isn’t, because today we’re mostly off-grid, trading the familiar B660, scene of so many a first drive and twin test, for the unclassified tendrils creeping off it every mile or two, linking farms and hamlets and nothing else in particular.
They are, to be frank, everything I normally dislike about the UK’s roads: riddled with potholes and subsidence and decades-old repair patches, too narrow, too off-camber, too covered in the muck of various creatures, and with poor sight-lines that almost never allow you to commit to a corner. Maybe, though, like complaining about the rain when you’re not wearing a coat, it’s been a case of the wrong equipment. Of course a 296 GTB or AMG something‑63 or this hour’s latest zillion-horsepower Scalextric car would be lousy here, unless their makers have a farm track element to their pre-production testing and never get above 40mph. You just need something more appropriate, that’s all.
To say the Rallye was born for such roads is almost an understatement. France’s smallest lanes aren’t dissimilar to our own (though, it has to be said, still better surfaced for the most part), designed to suit oxen and eventually paved for 2CVs and Renault 4Ls, and for a long while the nation’s superminis were penned with these routes in mind – think Land Rover-style suspension travel but a cabin you can touch both sides of from the driver’s seat. Furthermore, the Rallye was a true homologation special, designed for Group N and Group A regulations, and therefore for roads just like this, on which the likes of François Delecour would cut their teeth.
The Rallye started life as nothing more exotic than a three-door 205 shell and the 1124cc TU-series engine you’d find in every town square from Calais to Cannes. Peugeot Sport engineers bored and stroked the TU to an oversquare 72x69mm (for 1294cc, under rallying’s 1.3-litre limit), with a new crankshaft, a camshaft with lobes like the Alps, and a set of enormous Weber 40 sidedraught carburettors that, in the words of Rallye owner Andrew Bayliss, ‘are a pair of carbs with an engine attached’. Along with an exhaust from the 1.6 GTI, the 1.3 made 102bhp at 6800rpm and 88lb ft at 5000rpm, with the kind of peaky delivery you’d expect to see from something with a VTEC-branded cam cover. In order to access it you got a gearbox from the 205 XS, only geared like a bicycle, the XS’s 3.937:1 diff ratio making way for a 4.29, and a 4500rpm wall of noise at 70mph in fifth.
Given the 1.6 GTI had probably the best chassis of anything powering its front wheels in the 1980s, it was to nobody’s detriment that the Rallye inherited all the same parts for its undercarriage – struts up front, torsion bar-sprung trailing arms astern – nor that it shared the GTI’s brakes. The wheels and tyres were the exception – and now the most iconic part of any Rallye model. Made from steel, the originals were 13 inches in diameter, 5.5 wide and wrapped in 165/70 R13 Michelin MXVs. On this car they’re 14s and coincidentally on identical 175/60 Falken rubber to my 106 Rallye S2 that I’ve surreptitiously brought along for comparison – sourcing appropriate tyres for the 13s is like finding a pavement café serving a good croque monsieur in Bedfordshire.
The 14s still sit neatly under the Rallye’s chunky body-coloured extended arches. What it lacks in other visual addenda – unlike the GTIs, there are no thick rubbing strips down the sides, no fog lights, and originally not even a passenger-side door mirror – it makes up for with a coat of crisp white paintwork and subtle use of Peugeot Talbot Sport warpaint, the same four-colour flash worn by everything from the 205 T16 to the 905 prototype that won Le Mans in 1992.
Those colours appear again on the steering wheel boss (the wheel another part nicked from the GTI parts bin) and on the seats, which are trimmed in a kind of corduroy and manage to be at once absurdly squashy and plush but also incredibly well-bolstered and supportive. The dash, on the other hand, is as basic as Peugeot could give you at the time, without even central air vents or a radio, though the environment is far from oppressive, thanks to the extensive glazing and the bright red carpets and seatbelts
It is also, you’ll notice, left-hand drive. Peugeot UK did offer a Rallye-badged model in 1992, and while it riles owners to say so, it’s not quite the real deal, being more of a sticker pack on the 1.4-litre 75bhp XT. That’s a quarter less power than the French Rallye got, and 10 horses down even on the effervescent, sub-GTI XS. I’m not missing its right-hand seating position anyway. Today there’s nothing to overtake, and in some ways being a left-hooker is an advantage for our hedge-skimming, verge-clipping, oncoming car-avoiding mission, the view down the nearside all the better for sitting just inches from the point where the paved surface ends and nature begins.
The demarcation between well-trodden local roads and the narrower routes between them is nearly as stark. Sometimes you make it only ten metres or so before the more regularly resurfaced section runs out and makes way for a patchwork quilt chewed up by weather and tractors; other times you’ll be lucky enough to make it as far as the village limits before the road deteriorates.
Either way, the transition isn’t quite as nail-biting in a car like the 205. You’re joggled around a bit more, dashboard plastics clattering in sympathy, but where in anything too sleek you’d wince, temper your speed and start weaving around every crater like it’s a landmine, the Rallye invites you to drop it into second and go. Proper potholes are still worth avoiding as they don’t play nicely with 14-inch wheels, but where the road surface peaks and crests like the surf at Sennen Cove, there’s enough wheel travel, sidewall spring and ground clearance to ignore the subsidence completely. In places there’s not so much a crown in the road as a macadam mohawk, but the Pug simply sails over it, floorpan and exhaust system well out of harm’s way.
The ground clearance is almost immediately called into play when a few hundred metres up the road a bin lorry rounds the corner. With no passing areas and certainly no way of squeezing alongside on the road, I simply hoik the car up onto the grass verge. Try doing that in your GT3. Lorry cleared, we drop back down onto the road and carry on. It’s all the more impressive when you consider this car is actually a little lower than standard; owner Bayliss thinks it’s running Group A-spec Leda suspension, which could explain how it’s so adept at dealing with all the lumps.
The corners, too. On these roads you rarely get a long enough sequence of turns to build a rhythm. Instead you pick your moments, and a car like the Rallye is perfect for that. Maybe you finally get clear sight-lines through a ninety-right around the corner of a field; a quick blip from third to second and then a lift to help the car dive past the grassy apex with some attitude.
Most of the time you can’t see all the way through a corner, but you don’t mind. Even going cautiously you’re using a greater percentage of the Pug’s ability than in most other cars, so you’re rarely left with that frustrating sensation of leaving too much on the table. And you still get to use full throttle when you emerge on the other side, prelude to another cacophony of growling Webers, snarling back-box and the tug of each front wheel as it finds and loses purchase on the uneven surface.
We bounce around between villages with names like Woolley and Buckworth and Hamerton, rarely getting beyond fifty or so and rarely more than third gear, and still enjoying every minute. The car is behaving impeccably. Bayliss says the temperature needle has a habit of creeping up in traffic, but the old trick of sticking the heater and fans on always does the job to bring it back down. With some air flowing through the radiator, it hovers around the middle mark all day for us, but the big gargling carbs are playing ball too. There are no objections when the car is started and stopped repeatedly during our photography, and as long as you’re not asking too much of them from low revs, the engine pulls cleanly too.
This is an engine that undoubtedly does its best at the top end though. It’s responsive everywhere, but as the 5000rpm torque peak hints, it’s mostly disinterested below around 4000rpm. You’ve then got a two-grand window where the engine is at its best, and while peak power is in theory just a few hundred revs before the 7k red line, you don’t really need to venture above six. Again, this just makes second and third the perfect sub-B-road gears. Third is good for 78mph at 7000rpm, which means the 5000rpm sweet-spot works out to 56mph, conveniently within our nation’s limits. Even changing right-handed, the shift is just about perfect, second to third particularly sweet.
I hang a left turn, not really knowing where it’s going. It’s again single-track, lumpy, dusted with farmyard substances, though mercifully it’s been a week or more since it last rained so it isn’t all splashing up the side of the 205 and covering those brilliant stripes. The road jinks right, and it’s clear enough to carry some speed. A dab on the brakes is all you need to shed momentum in something this light, then just turn in with some conviction, feel the tyres bite, and let the Rallye’s fantastic balance do the rest.
GTIs were known for really weighting-up mid-corner but the Rallye doesn’t need nearly so much muscle. With so little weight (793kg being the official figure) and skinny rubber, the steering – though high-geared at 3.8 turns between lock-stops – feels more like that of something mid-engined. All the better for feedback too. And you’re never left guessing where the nose is, not least because the car’s so small you can see all four corners from where you’re sitting.
We return to our usual roads to wrap up and I can’t help but laugh at the contrast; the B660 feels like the M1 after all those single-tracks. Here’s another benefit of a car like the 205: all that room to breathe when the road finally does open up. You can basically pick your line through a corner without ever going near the catseyes, and even play around with a throttle lift, rear wheels still well inside the white lines.
A day exploring the lanes has been illuminating, the Rallye ideal for roads that most other performance cars would struggle to navigate, let alone enjoy. It’s tempting to chase perfection when it comes to The Thrill of Driving – big power, flowing curves, alpine vistas, that kind of thing – but maybe there’s another way: small roads, even smaller cars.
This story was first featured in evo issue 324.
