Citroëns went up and down, remember? They raised and lowered themselves when they started and stopped, as if riding on a languorous cushion of equal parts French creative engineering and magic. It was that parlor trick, the hydro-pneumatic suspension, that still scares people away from buying them.
“I’m a mechanical engineer,” said Jean-Francois Martin, owner and mechanic at Marrs Automotive in Santa Clarita, California. “Yes, and then autodidact and then I just started liking cars. Just one day I was like, ‘That’s interesting. I’d like to know how it works.’”He started with a moped when he was just 14 in his native France. It was a 1963 Peugeot BB 63, given to him with a seized engine. He got it running again, of course.
“I was 17 and a half and I started fixing it up, and then I was 18, you have to be 18 in France to drive. When I was 18 plus one day—boom—I was down at the local DMV.”He worked for Delphi, first in France then in Ohio, then for Cosworth Racing, then for Honda Performance Development where they build the race engines in Santa Clarita. Which brought him to Marrs Automotive, a large garage full of French cars – mostly Citroëns—stacked two high on lifts, being repaired.
“It’s both,” he said, holding a sphere like that statue of the baby Jesus holding an orb. “You have the hydraulic side on the suspension side where the pump is pumping the fluid and making it move and pressurizing it. And then here,” , “you have a cloud of nitrogen. So that’s why it’s called olio pneumatic—olio for oil, pneumatic for air.”“This is the diaphragm that’s inside,” . “It’s mounted this way . And then the nitrogen just pushes it out this way.
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