My 1974 Citroën Dyane 6: A Contrarian’s First Car

Sometimes the best car stories begin not with the obvious choice, but with the one nobody else wanted. While my friends bought Minis, I followed my own path with a Citroën Dyane 6, a quirky French hatchback that would carry me through university, across Europe, and into the next chapter of my life. Did I say I could be a contrarian? Thought so…

I went to University in the North East of England which in those days was a 7 hour train journey in the land that invented trains. Fed up with hauling my stuff across town to the City Station, on and off trains three times then hoping my parents had got the message to come and collect me for the 30 minute drive to the family home, was when my flat mate rocked up after the second Christmas with a Mini. Of his own. And my other flat mate telling us he’d been looking at Minis too. I couldn’t wait for the Easter break and a raid on the piggy bank.

I thought my budget was quite generous in those days at £900 – about £5000 today (US$6700). It was all I had. Every penny. I wanted a Citroën. Phil’s Mini was fun and I’d been lent my Aunt’s Mini and I knew how they could handle and they were easy to make faster. But I wanted a Citroën. My neighbour had lent me her Beetle 1200 the previous summer. I didn’t want a Beetle. I wanted a Citroën. I went across the County and looked at a SAAB 96 Estate. I’d liked SAABs (I didn’t tell you I liked SAABs in the last chapter? Sorry, but I did). I thought they were clever. Built by engineers doing things because they were better not just different for the sake of it. The 96 I could afford had belonged to a pig farmer. You could smell that from the sales office. That was why it was cheap but I couldn’t afford the insurance for a 1.5litre V4 in any case.

Nor could I afford the insurance for a Citroën Ami Super. Based on a 2CV but with a 1015cc flat 4 instead of a 602cc flat twin and suitably beefier gearbox, suspension and brakes, nobody wanted them. They were relatively expensive new, had a reputation for rusting like crazy and were for the most part plain weird, especially compared to a Mini. That endeared me a great deal! It was a mid blue ’73 and I can see it to this day sitting prominently at the front of the dealer’s lot and no-one paying it any attention. That’s why I could afford it. What I couldn’t afford was the insurance for that either. Same as the SAAB, it blew my budget. Dad had decided in his carefully considered wisdom befitting his career as a lawyer, that a student didn’t need a car. He wouldn’t lend me the difference. So I bought a RUJ 487N, a 1974 Citroën Dyane 6 instead. The Dyane was closer in spirit to the 2CV on which it was based whilst not being as urbane as an Ami. A year younger than the Ami Super it was half the price to insure and by goodness that car worked hard for the next five years and 75,000 miles.

I returned early to University after the Easter Break not just to make sure I got a parking space before my Mini owning friends turned, but because I had stuff to do. I bumped into a girl one afternoon when I was on an errand in the City and she was at a bit of a loose end. We’d met a few times before, so I asked if she wanted to go to the cinema? Afterwards I suggested (as I now had a car) we could drive to a pub on the edge of the city called The Mitre. We weren’t so worried about drink driving in those days but on returning to the car a tyre was flat. I’d parked on a nail. I was livid. Really annoyed. I’d been so pleased not a week before to have negotiated two new tyres and a small bit of welding rather than a price reduction on my new car and now one of the tyres was wrecked. I would have to go without lunches for weeks to pay for that! But the girl was quite impressed I knew how to change a wheel and we were back on the road.

I learned she had a ’66 Vauxhall Viva which her Dad had resuscitated from the dead. Its distributor drive was out of true and it would eat its points in 1000 miles. She could change them in less than two minutes at the roadside and always carried a screwdriver in her handbag. All the same she didn’t invite me in when I dropped her off afterwards.

The Dyane got used daily. We’d drive to the coast for an evening, or seek out country pubs beyond the City. Friends played fiddle in a ceilidh band and on more than one occasion they would stand where the back seat of the Dyane wasn’t (it was easily removable) and, with the roof open, we would return to the City with them playing Scottish reels. I don’t think rear seat belt wearing was compulsory in those days but standing with a violin in a moving vehicle was definitely illegal after midnight. We were never stopped. Not once.

I let my mates have a go in the Dyane. Most hated it. Phil could see the point but he was British Leyland through and through. I had a few more dates with the girl and I let her drive the Dyane. It was quite different to her Vauxhall but she managed it, quite well in fact. I think she only selected reverse instead of first once on the X pattern dashboard gear change. At the end of term I drove her home 250 miles down the A1 before tackling the remaining 100 miles west to my own home. I did that 200 mile round trip across country several times that summer before she went to Germany for a year as part of her degree.

After nine months of daily correspondence I went to Leverkusen to fetch Janice and her stuff from her student lodgings and the Dyane carried us south down the Romantische Strasse and across the Alps to Venice. When we stopped at Füssen in Bavaria I proposed.

For the next academic year Janice was back in Newcastle and I got a year out job in a midland town called Telford. It was a five hour drive in those days and you can see how I racked up 15000 miles in a year as a student. We went camping every weekend we could manage including a trip to the Netherlands. It was the only time I ever thought my Dad was wrong. I really had needed that car.

After she graduated, Janice got a job enabling her to live back home with her parents and I returned to the North East to complete my degree. We were still 250 miles apart and the Dyane kept on beating its way up and down the country. That summer we decided to go to Cornwall. The future Mrs Owl had never been. We never got there.

There is a set of springs that hold two cogs together at the end of the camshaft which drive what counts for a distributor on a flat twin Citroën. One of the three springs broke and there was no advance or retard so the engine wouldn’t really idle and it wouldn’t really rev, and if it would, it would only gain speed slowly. We limped back to Janice’s parents to think about what to do.

Now, my mechanical skills are largely self-taught as an impecunious necessity. The Dyane had needed service items every 6000 miles and oddities like new engine mounts and brake shoes (inboard drums on a Dyane are a right royal pain). I’d mastered resetting the points which requires removing the cooling fan and is not as straightforward as it sounds. But the thought of splitting an engine to replace the timing cogs was out of my league. Besides I was trying to spend time with my now fiancée having spent most of the two years of courting in different countries. I found an exchange engine for an affordable price about 2 hours away and we made a trip to fetch it. I won’t forget walking down a High Street with a short block flat twin tucked under my arm. Can’t do that with a Small Block Chevy…

I was quite pleased with how stripping the old engine and building up the new and installing it went. 40+ years on, I think I should have tried fixing the old engine but it had done 100,000+ miles and I had no intention of changing the rest of the car for a while. There was a wedding to sort out and a house to find albeit the first priority was finding a job.

But before a young man of a motoring persuasion does a rash thing like getting married – even to a girl who can change a set of points in less than two minutes – it’s important to get the fleet in order.  Janice was commuting half an hour each way to work including a section of a busy dual carriageway. A ’66 Viva with dodgy points wasn’t the best so we went car shopping – or rather I did (with her money). There was a really nice yellow Citroën Visa Club – all 652cc air cooled twin – at the dealer in Bedford but she wasn’t having it. I guess she thought 34bhp to push 745kg really wasn’t enough to get safely onto the main road. We found a Visa Super (1124cc Peugeot four pot chucking out a mighty 50bhp for only 55kg weight penalty) so she had that instead.

It was only three years old but already had surface rust on the sills and signs of deeper corrosion in the door pillars and under the windscreen. Situation normal then. Shall we say it wasn’t the most reliable car on the planet and left Janice stranded when the electrics gave up. Amazingly her Dad came past at that moment – it was quite away from his home – and got it all going with household wire and clothes pegs.

With Janice’s new car fixed getting a job, finding a house and getting married all fell into place and we found ourselves each with sensible half hour commute albeit in exactly opposite directions. Now we had our own house with its own drive, we could start thinking about cars again.

 

Related CC reading:

Curbside Classic: 1980 Citroën Dyane 6 – The Uglier Duckling