22 Nov 06
A Peugeot 207 Super 2000 rally car fires up in the paddock, idling busily and impatiently with its angry wap-wap-wap, drowning out the LWs and Spiders circulating around the Loheac circuit as its transmission clatters and churns. It sits low and wide on its tarmacadam-spec wheels and suspension, its style that of the 207 LW but tougher and more muscular. There's a cabin air vent on the roof, a hefty spoiler behind and when did you last see rear wheels pushed as far out to the corners as these?
It's Peugeot's new customer rally car for national championships and the Junior WRC category, with a 280bhp, naturally aspirated engine, a Sadev six-speed sequential transmission linked to four-wheel drive via three auto-locking disc differentials - and a €168,000 pre-tax price-tag. The basic body structure is regular 207, but there's now a transmission tunnel and the rear suspension mountings are altered to take the strut system that goes with the four-wheel drive.
I open the door, climb past the obstacle course that is the welded-in roll cage, drop into the Sparco seat, hold the Sparco steering wheel that's set a good six inches further out of the dashboard than standard. It's all about weight distribution. There's no instrumentation ahead, just warning lights; a digital display lurks in the facia centre but I'm unlikely to need to heed its information right now.
Heavy clutch down, pull the gear lever - it sprouts from the steering column and is topped, incongruously, by a wooden knob - into first. Ker-lunk. To get 280bhp from 2.0 litres, with an 8,500rpm rev limit, means this engine has a fairly wild pair of camshafts, which is why the idle is so fractious. So I need to give it a lot of revs to avoid stalling as I let the heavy, short-travel, floor-hinged clutch pedal up. I won't be needing it again once on the move.
