My 42 Years With A Citroën Ami: The £90 Car That Became a Lifetime Companion

– Posted on August 26, 2026

By the end of 1984, having put another 20,000 miles on the Citroën Dyane it was clear its days were going to either be numbered or expensive. We’d been members of the Citroën Car Club since 1980 and later also joined 2CVGB so we were well aware of the ‘fashion,’ if you could call it that, of putting 2CV or Dyane bodies onto the chassis of Citroën’s Ami Super.

Like the Dyane and 2CV, the Ami was a member of Citroën’s ‘A’ Series family and most Amis – both in saloon and break or estate form – were basically rebodied 2CVs. Slightly more powerful, more refined, and arguably slightly less wind resistant, but 2CVs all the same. I can imagine Citroën’s Product Planner in the early 70s lying in bed thinking ‘I wonder if the engineers could slip the flat 4 from our shiny new GS range into an Ami body: The missing evolutionary link!” After he’d bought the Director of Engineering a couple of pastis for breakfast, maybe it sounded like they’d got a plan.

What they ended up with was a lot different though. Yes a flat four would fit but the chassis would need to be altered because the engine mountings are different. It would need a new cross member – and the front legs of the chassis would need to be wider apart. And stronger. The inner wings would need to be changed. And the bulkhead would need to accommodate a floor rather than a dashboard gearchange. The suspension would need to be beefed up too. A stiffer anti roll bar at the front and one at the rear wasn’t going to suffice, so in went larger diameter and stiffer longitudinal springs under the floor (necessitating different floorpans), stronger tie rods and bigger leading and trailing arms. None of which were interchangeable with any other ‘A’ Series.

They didn’t do anything about the propensity for an Ami shell to rust out as you watched it, even if the heavy duty chassis might have a life of its own. Although the Ami Super didn’t really catch on (only about 42,000 were made out of a total of 1.8 million Amis, the majority of which were the ‘Break’ or estate version), by the early 80’s there were rotten Supers to be found. A Dyane body would more or less bolt on in place of the rusted through Ami shell. A 2CV required a little more ingenuity, often mainly comprising tin snips, bean cans and filler. Meanwhile I’d got the taste for rapid acceleration from the Visa Super (0-60 in 15+ seconds compared to around 36 for the Dyane) so what I figured, looking at the corrosion spread along the underside of the Dyane, was that I needed to drop the shell onto an Ami Super chassis, sit back and enjoy Visa like performance.

MOP 131P was acquired from a gentleman in North London on 28 May 1984. It was first registered in Birmingham in August 1976 and had two previous lady owners. Ami Super production finished in February ’76 and right hand drive production in summer ’75, so it had spent its first year of existence going nowhere – I told you no-one wanted them. Its initial owners clocked up an average of 4500 miles a year and the guy I bought it from had used it sparingly so it had only done 34,944 miles. Now he just wanted rid because the car had 2 days of tax and one week left on its test certificate. It wouldn’t get another as the floors were rotten; in fact everything below the belt line was rusted through, including the bottom of the B pillars. The outer wings including the fuel filler were held on with string. It was less than 8 years old. I paid £90 and took it away. I worried as I drove the 40 miles up the motorway that the seat would literally drop to the tarmac and I would be full Fred Flintstone. What it did seem to have was a sound chassis with paperwork attesting to extra rust proofing and no apparent corrosion in the front bulkhead or in the rain gutters or the roof …and the engine seemed to work!

We had a garage, small but dry. I started dismantling MOP, as we soon came to call her, but it was quickly clear that for the want of some panels it was actually pretty sound. Yes, the dash top had warped in the sun and the cloth part of the seats and all the foam padding was totally rotten but I was finding myself piling up parts that were actually better than the equivalents on my Dyane. I very soon began to investigate the feasibility of restoring the car rather than scrapping it.

Enter a man called Giles Creasey, son of the proprietor of a Citroën dealership not too far away from our home. I knew I couldn’t weld new panels in myself because the B pillars would need to be held in a jig if I ever wanted the doors to shut and latch. Despite the shortage of funds – we were both working professional jobs, but we had a new mortgage to pay – Janice was up for getting the welding done properly. A deal was struck and away it went. When it was returned I painted all the new metal with International Yacht Primer because I figured if it was designed to resist salt water it might have a chance at preventing the Ami rusting through again, at least for a while. My father in law said he could spray it and erected a tent in the garden to protect it from the elements so the Ami was moved again.

Two other things happened at this time. One it became increasingly clear that my Dyane was not going to pass its next inspection due in March ’85 – in fact it was becoming a question of what wouldn’t it fail on? Secondly, I got a new job in the consultancy sector. There was no more pay (but way better prospects) and most important, it came with a company Ford Escort. With fully funded wheels (including all my private use petrol paid for), I no longer had to worry about transport. It no longer mattered what happened to the Dyane that had served me for so long and so well (I’ll forgive it the almost catastrophic engine failure) and neither did I have to rush to get the Ami roadworthy. When the spraying was finished my father in law delivered the rolling shell to us on a trailer and I began the slow task of reassembling it all.

Eventually finished, tested and taxed, I drove MOP gingerly across country to the Citroën Club’s Annual Rally in the Midlands. We took a support vehicle in case – which broke down – but we won a prize. That was summer 1988, it had taken 4 years.

Since then we’ve toured Europe in MOP to attend 2CV World Meetings. In no particular order its been to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, Italy and last year, Ireland. Many of those countries we’ve visited more than once, which is not bad for a car that seemed destined to rust in peace in the back streets of a wet Birmingham…

Travelling in Eastern Europe for the first time was only just after the Iron Curtain came down. They weren’t used to West Europeans in what was Czechoslovakia and we couldn’t get into Croatia because they were having a war. In Estonia the border guards took a particular interest – I don’t think they could figure out how English people could be driving something that looked worse than the cars that had been served up in the communist era.

When we started touring it was just the two of us but we eventually started a family and our daughter was only 18 months when we set off for Finland and the Arctic Circle. There is space under the seats so packing carefully we could fit in all our camping equipment, clothes, food and everything a baby needs. When our son was born we got a small trailer. As we were heading over the Alps to Italy for the next World Meeting I decided as a temporary measure to swap the 52bhp 1015 cc motor for a 1220 cc motor with a mighty 60bhp and 64ft/lb of torque which I happened to have – wait for the next chapter! Did it make a difference? It felt like it at the time but we still needed first gear to scale the French Alps. How temporary? Well, that was 1997 and the 1015 is still on the bench waiting for me to make the car a genuine matching numbers item again.

An engine swap should be simple and mainly it is but the 1220 (and later 1299 cc – yes I know, a mighty 79 cubic inches) flat fours derive their modest extra capacity from a longer stroke. So the exhaust manifolds are a tiny bit further apart. So the pipes that lead into a single silencer under the front footwell never quite meet up properly. It’s taken until 2025 to get a bespoke stainless system built which means we can be exhaust putty free! So having finally done that I guess the 1220 is here to stay for a while longer.

Yes, we still own the Ami. The body got restored again professionally in 2002 and is beginning to look like it needs some TLC but the chassis is as sound as the day we bought the car. MOP has featured in several magazines and on-line articles – and now here. At one point I believe MOP was the only surviving Right Hand Drive Ami Super saloon on the road anywhere in the world. There are a handful of estates but the saloon was always rarer. I think two more have been restored in recent years – one has gone to live in France, the other hasn’t been seen for a while and was never matching numbers. MOP predates our children by several years. She turned 50 this June but still has less than 90,000 miles on the clock. After 42 years ownership and counting she’ll be the last one of the fleet to go. That yacht primer was jolly good stuff…