| Road Test Citroen C2 GT |
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Genuinely Junior It's only three years since Citroen's current World Rally Championship leader Sébastien Loeb was in Super 1600 - in fact, winning the 2001 Junior WRC for that category of car in a Saxo. Having been concentrating on the bigger stuff, Citroen is getting ready to re-enter Super 1600 with a rally version of the C2, although the precise date on which it will kick off its competition career has been shifting around somewhat. Within the next three or four months, for almost sure. Super 1600 cars, of course, have to be based on a production model of which the manufacturer guarantees to build at least 2500 examples. Citroen is therefore producing that many units of the C2 GT, with 250 reserved for competition customers and the whole of the rest of the allocation being built in right-hand drive form for export to the UK, as an acknowledgement of the fact that this was the number one international market for the hot Saxos. No Shy Retiring Flower You won't miss the GT on the road, or when parked. It has the same angular styling, of course, as the rest of the GT range, but comes with 16" white-painted alloy wheels (not wheel trims) as standard, and a tailpipe of a size which would just about let a westward-facing GT in Kent be heard clearly just off the Belgian coast, but for the fact that the 1.6-litre engine isn't tuned beyond 108bhp. There's also a tailgate spoiler available, odd though it looks on the very abrupt, not to say vertical, C2 rear end.
While there's obviously a considerable difference between the rally car and the standard road-going GT, especially at the latter's trimmed-down price of just under £10,500, other things have been trimmed out too.
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With the Saxo out of production, the buyers who made the VTR and VTS models the UK's top-selling hot hatches have various versions of the replacement C2 to consider, including one with both rarity value and a soon-to-be-realised international sporting connection.
