After the sturdy, workmanlike Viva, the Citroen GS was a technological marvel - a masterpiece of innovative engineering. It won the title of European Car of the Year in 1974; it was also the singular most unreliable, troublesome car I have ever owned.
I’m sad that these days Citroen is just another manufacturer of vanilla-coloured cars. Back then, they were really pushing the boundaries of technology and design and often they pushed them just a little too far.
The GS was front-wheel drive (most were still RWD) but that was just the start:
- The enine was an air-cooled flat four
- Brakes were inboard discs
- Brakes were power assisted, but no ABS
- Suspension was hydraulic and self-levelling
- It had class-leading aerodynamics
I bought the car with my heart, rather than my head. It had metallic green paintwork and green fabric seats. Most cars were faux-leather and fabric seats were a hallmark of luxury. It also had head restraints - one of the things I’d dreamed about - and it was a four-door.
The Citroen was M-reg and the first car I paid more than £1,000 for - I even treated myself to a radio.
Compared to other cars on the market, the GS’s aerodynamic design really set it apart. I thought I’d got a bargain and I even bought it with a scrape on the rear offside bodywork on the basis that the car was marked down and it would only cost me £100 to get it repaired.
That was my first mistake. The paintwork had faded and so, when the car was resprayed on the rear wing with the same factory paint, it was a different shade. I ended up getting the whole of the side of the car resprayed - a much bigger bill than I’d expected.
Starting the car was always a dark art. It was a flat-four, air-cooled with a single carburettor and a choke, so not unlike a VW Beetle. Unlike the Beetle, it revved willingly and wasn’t strangled by its own exhaust, but it didn’t like cold, it didn’t like damp and it didn’t seem to like me some mornings. I eventually developed a knack and an understanding of how to get it to start (full choke, three slow pumps of the accelerator and then foot off the throttle when you crank the engine), but I was never confident. Even with my honed technique, sometimes it would give a Gallic shrug and there would be nothing you could do except wait a few minutes and try again.
When I’d had the car a few weeks, I decided I’d take the spark plugs out to give then a clean and check the gaps. This was an incredibly difficult job. On the Viva, the engine stood high and proud with a foot and a half of space each side. Removing spark plugs couldn’t have been easier! On the Citroen, the engine sat low and flat and because it was air-cooled, it had a large fan at the front (driven off the crankshaft) to pull in lots of air, which was directed around the engine via a large metal cowl. Opening the bonnet of the GS revealed a hidden, alien world for anyone used to standard motor car engineering.
I worked out where the spark plugs were and managed to get the first one out. It looked fine, biscuit brown and the correct gap. I decided the others would be OK too and abandoned my DIY, but when I put the spark plug back in, it wouldn’t tighten, it just kept turning. I put the cap back on and the engine started but as soon as the cylinder got some compression applied, the plug popped out. I lodged it back in and the engine ran quite well on three cylinders (well enough to get me to the garage on Monday).
I’d overtightened the plug and stripped the thread. The Citroen had an aluminium cylinder head (most cars were iron) and aluminium being softer, it was relatively easy to do. I’d feared a big bill, but the garage had done a few of these before and they just put in a helicoil insert (basically a plug with a new spark plug hole. I kept clear of the spark plugs after that.
The GS has a 1050cc engine, but being a flat-four configuration, it had good torque characteristics and it revved much more freely than the Vauxhall. These days (and even then) it would be considered seriously under-powered, but I felt it was an improvement on the Viva and, remember, these were the days when there were plenty of VW Beetles, Fiat Cinquecentoes (which actually were 500cc back then), Mini 850s and also plenty of Citroen Ami, Dyane and 2CVs with engines ranging from 600cc to 800cc.
The really odd thing was the suspension. The hydraulic pressure was provided by a pump so that when the engine wasn’t running the car settled down on its stops and pumped itself up again once the engine started. You had to be careful where you parked it because if you put the front over a kerb, when it settled down it would ground itself and damage the bodywork. The suspension had three settings - standard (for normal use), high (for greater ground clearance if you were driving across a field, which I never did, but which the French do all the time apparently) and a setting which jacked it right up, used only when you were changing wheels.
I liked the feeling when the engine started and the car came into life. It would haul itself up at the front at first and then the back of the car would rise before it made a few final adjustments. It only took 10 seconds or so, but it felt like an animal stretching itself after a snooze. The suspension never gave me any trouble, it was a superb ride and would also mitigate against dive when braking.
The pump that provided the suspension pressure also provided power for the brakes. These were the best brakes I’d ever experienced and at first it was hard not to stand the car on its nose by braking too hard. There was hardly any travel in the pedal and it operated more like a switch than anything else.
The discs were inboard rather than being within the wheel, the idea being to have bigger discs while also keeping the unsprung weight down to help handling. Downside was that because the discs were inside the car body, they didn’t get as much air flowing around them to keep them cool. Brake overheating and fade was a reported problem, but I never experienced any difficulty, except with the handbrake. This was typically French. It was applied by pulling out a lever from under the dashboard and it must have clamped a couple of calipers against the disc. It would never hold on anything but the lightest slope despite being adjusted again and again by the garage.
I’d gone from rod-and-cable brakes (Ford Popular) where you have to brace yourself in the seat and push as hard as you could to get the car to stop to the power discs of the Citroen where the lightest touch was all you needed in eight years of motoring. One grumble about the GS was the steering. Considering everything else was power assisted/operated, the steering was not. It was excessively heavy at parking speed and the steering wheel was fashionably small - no dustbin lid like the FWD Mini.
Our longest trip in the car was to Falmouth in Cornwall to visit our friends Andy Butcher and his girlfriend (later wife) Mandy. After a week in Cornwall, we headed up to Helpston, near Peterborough, where my sister Margaret and husband Mick were living. In those days the M5 was only two lanes and would back up in numerous places. Also the A30 through Okehampton, Launceston and Bodmin was single carriageway, so there were massive hold-ups on summer weekends. We drove down overnight and arrived about 7am on a bright summer morning and I had ice-cream for breakfast. We were so early we had to hang around for a while until our friends were awake.
It was a good holiday and we drove all around Cornwall in the car, including Land’s End, The Lizard, Mousehole and Helston.
The journey to my sister’s the following Saturday was another long one. I think we went A303 and A34, then across to Northampton on the A43. I was pushing the car hard to try to get there in a decent time and I noticed a grinding, whine coming from the front wheel. I’d had the wheel bearing replaced just before going on holiday and thought they’d put a duff bearing in. When I checked it out at Helpston, the wheel was physically loose; I jacked it up and took the wheel off and the main nut that holds on the wheel assembly was within a turn of coming off (and the wheel with it). The nut was castellated, so it had bumps around it. Once it was tightened, a locking pin was inserted through a hole in the spindle and it rested within the bumps so the nut couldn’t unscrew. The garage had failed to insert the locking pin when they changed the wheel bearing!
I called the RAC and they came to collect it. The car was driven onto a low loader and we got caught out with the suspension, the car settling onto the winch by the bulkhead when the engine was switched off. I had to jump in quickly and start the engine before too much damage was done to the front valance. The car was soon fixed, it just needed a new locking pin.
We liked Peterborough, Stamford and the villages and that holiday was probably what persuaded us to move to Peterborough the following spring, so the Citroen had another couple of trips when I went for an interview to the Peterborough Standard and then when we moved to Bretton.
In spite of its reliability issues, I liked the GS. It was a supremely comfortable car, but it was also suffering from the start of corrosion, with a line of bubbles appearing in the paintwork around the rear wing where the internal mudguard was attached to the bodywork.
I sold it for about £800 when I got my next car (my first company car) an S-reg Morris Marina 1.3GL.
Thanks to Joost Bakker for the image.
Also see:
Ford Popular - click
Bedford HA Van - click
Morris Mini - click
Vauxhall Viva HC - click
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