Sunday 9th July 2017

Citroen needs help making a C3 WRC

French firm wants a road-going WRC homage - how would you do it?

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Citroen wants to make a sporty road car that links back to its big-budget WRC rally car programme - but it doesn't yet know how. CEO Linda Jackson has given the project to product planning boss Xavier Peugeot, but admits "we don't yet have a solution."

It's an important project, she said, during a recent interview in Paris. "Why do we go rallying? To increase awareness of the Citroen brand; marketing thus needs to create a road car link back to it." Citroen is running the C3 in WRC this year and Jackson admits that "if we are winning, it shows our cars have high-performance endurance, but we don't yet have a close link yet."

So, she's open to suggestions. She admitted multiple ideas are now being considered, which made us think. Why don't we crowdsource PistonHeads readers to come up with the ideal spec for a sporty Citroen, and send across our suggestions? There's a little guidance from Jackson here: she suggests it shouldn't be too extreme and far down the hot hatch scale: PSA already has DS 3 Performance and 208 GTI by PS doing that job for it. She suggests a different, more accessible take on performance, which we're happy to run with.

How about this for starters: take the regular 1.2-litre PureTech 110 C3, swap the engine for the 130hp iteration from the Peugeot 3008 and bingo: you've a car with a better power-to-weight ratio than the old AX GT (and way more torque). In Flair guise, the C3 PureTech weighs 1050kg; strip out a few bits (split-fold rear seat, space-saver spare wheel, rear electric windows, some soundproofing) and you could get it tantalisingly close to 1000kg. Sportier springs and dampers would be an easy fit, but we wouldn't go too extreme on the firmness - an element of all-surface drivability, a la the WRC car, is quite appealing, no? A sort of Ariel Nomad-style approach: it would work well with the chunky wheel arches and Airbumps.

Citroen has a ready-made real-world alternative to sporting brands' inbuilt GoPro systems, too: ConnectedCAM Citroen. Standard on the Flair, this auto-records 30 seconds before and a minute after a heavy braking incident, so you can save it if you need to report a crash. Why not alter this to kicking in when you press a sport button on the dash, so you can easily share your hot hatch exploits to social media? Quite the winner with the younger buyers it seems Jackson would like such a car to appeal to (hence not going too crazy on the power).

With some well-judged WRC-style styling and a suitably snazzy set of alloys, it sounds like a winner to us, particularly as it needn't cost a fortune, so wouldn't step on the 208 GTI's toes. And if there were any issues with using the WRC name for a road car, surely Mr. Peugeot could secure the use of the Rallye brand, no? That's our starter for 10, anyway - now, over to you. How would you create an affordable WRC-inspired Citroen C3 good enough to win kudos from enthusiasts? PH - and Citroen - would love to hear from you.

[Rally shots: LAT Photo]

[MustardCutter]

Needs a turbo'd 4 banger, 4WD, big wheel arches and rear spoiler for any kind of WRC link/credibility IMO. Else it's just marketing guff. Of course none of that could be filed under affordable or young driver insurance friendly so I fear what they end up producing will be as lame as the 'by Loeb' editions of yesteryear...

Edited by MustardCutter on Thursday 6th July 15:19

[MustardCutter]

I think a lot of people missed the "she suggests it shouldn't be too extreme and far down the hot hatch scale" bit from the article