Mon dieu! There's a Peugeot 205 T16 for sale
Have a quarter of a million spare for a rare mid-engined classic? Voilà...
Here’s a question for you: is the Peugeot 205 T16 underappreciated? Honestly. It’s just never the first car to come up in any conversation. Think of the crazy mid-engined French superminis (a really, really tiny niche of cars) and it’s probably the turbocharged or V6 Renaults that spring to mind. If the discussion is about Group B rally machines then surely Audi Quattro and Lancia Delta are mentioned ahead of it. Heck, the T16 probably isn’t the first fast 205 you’d think of.
See, underappreciated. We were only being slightly facetious. Of course, present any car enthusiast with a T16, the 205 that looks like it’s swallowed another 205, and they’ll be giddy with excitement, but for such a special machine it doesn’t seem to be talked about very much. Maybe we need to have better conversations. Not only did the competition car win back-to-back WRC drivers’ and constructors’ titles (as well as 16 of the 26 rallies it entered), the T16 was an actual Group B champion. Only Peugeot, the Audi Quattro and the Opel Ascona can claim drivers’ titles in the 1982-1986 period, with Lancia taking a manufacturers’ crown with the 037. It’s an elite club, for sure. And there aren’t many cooler car and driver combos in WRC history than Juha Kankkunen and a 205 T16 E2…
Anyway, the road car. Little demonstrates just what a huge deal world rallying was 40 years ago like the lengths gone to for Group B machines. How on earth it could have been deemed viable to make a front-wheel drive shopping car into a mid-engined, four-wheel drive rally rocket - and sell just 200 of them - it’s hard to know. But let’s all be glad that Peugeot could make the numbers work, because the result was a truly iconic homologation car. Even if people still don’t think about it enough.
This 1984 car was originally an Italian market example, and featured in Quattroroute magazine back then. What a day at work that must have been for the writer and photographer. Little is known about its story in the decades following that, with the T16 then imported into the UK in 2016 and bought by its current owner the year after. Use after that was sparing but regular, with consecutive MOTs for a few years; to this day the Peugeot is showing just 12,500 km, or less than 8,000 miles, which is believed to be genuine.
Perhaps most excitingly of all, however, is the fact that this 205 T16 has been recently prepped for sale. To the tune of almost £15,000. So for those who want to experience what a 200hp, four-wheel drive, mid-engined 205 is like (and not just store it), then it sounds like there’d be no reason not to. Probably it won’t feel a whole lot faster than an Mi16-swapped GTI, but that’s not really the point. Nothing from the decade short of a 288 GTO is going to receive so much adoration.
The asking price for this RM Sotheby’s car is £265,000, which is obviously an incredible amount of money for a Peugeot 205. But there are already folks spending six figures with Tolman to create their perfect GTIs (don’t forget they can help with T16 maintenance!), and the last Sport Quattro we featured on PH was almost £400,000 more expensive. Which is an amount that’s quite hard to ignore. Told you underappreciated wasn’t a totally silly idea…
Eight years later and in rural Suffolk, I was looking to get into car sales and had a choice of franchises. I chose Peugeot, because of seeing that car. My youthful mind thought I'd get a chance to engage with such things. Sadly, in a crushing example of expectation vs. reality, most of my sales were 205 diesels. Oh well.
Superb thing, it’d be a toss-up between this, the 037 and the RS200 for me. Oh to have the choice…
Superb thing, it d be a toss-up between this, the 037 and the RS200 for me. Oh to have the choice
As far as I can tell, it’s primarily the centre section (doors, screen, front of roof), lights and bits of the dashboard.
Eight years later and in rural Suffolk, I was looking to get into car sales and had a choice of franchises. I chose Peugeot, because of seeing that car. My youthful mind thought I'd get a chance to engage with such things. Sadly, in a crushing example of expectation vs. reality, most of my sales were 205 diesels. Oh well.
A mate, who clearly isn't a "car guy" bought a new 205 diesel in 93 on K plate .. basic spec and flat pale blue paint .. I took him to the garage in Hertford to collect it
He still has it .. and it still runs perfectly (ish)
But yes the one above is superb
I remember about 15 years ago the cheapest way into a pukka Group B road car was a Citroen 4TC, at about €40k. Always thought there was a certain irony in that given Citroen itself destroyed quite a few of them making it a very rare car
Incidentally, I’d never noticed these T16s had a rear wiper before
Eight years later and in rural Suffolk, I was looking to get into car sales and had a choice of franchises. I chose Peugeot, because of seeing that car. My youthful mind thought I'd get a chance to engage with such things. Sadly, in a crushing example of expectation vs. reality, most of my sales were 205 diesels. Oh well.
A mate, who clearly isn't a "car guy" bought a new 205 diesel in 93 on K plate .. basic spec and flat pale blue paint .. I took him to the garage in Hertford to collect it
He still has it .. and it still runs perfectly (ish)
But yes the one above is superb
Regarding shared parts: I believe the steering wheel is the same as an early, Phase 1 GTI. It looks the same, anyway.
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