Once again, we were off on our great annual pilgrimage to seek the Holy Grail—the Car of the Year.
Provoked by this isolation, Citroën-watchers have often tried to explain the individuality of the company’s cars in terms of a monastic cloistering of its designers, cut off from all contact with “ordinary” cars and their makers. They’re so isolated, the theory goes, that their designs have to be different. This hypothesis breaks down, however, when confronted with the outstanding way Citroën cars perform in the real world.
That is the structure and those are the men who are concerned with setting Citroën’s overall direction and giving it what it needs to do the job. How it does it is the affair of the men in Automobiles Citroën’s Bureau d’Etudes, most literally the company’s Design Office. When asked how the Office was organized, one of its top men laughed and asked in return, “In theory or practice?” and then added, in a characteristically French expression, “It’s not good, but it works.
For a completely new car like the GS, Citroën would build as many as 100 different experimental cars embodying different features they wanted to try out. From what they learned they’d make 10 more, then four more, then three after that, and finally one car that summed up the best ideas they’d developed. Then of that single basic design they’d build some 30 prototypes for durability testing, each of them differing from the others in some small details.
Revising the front suspension also allowed the engineers to build in some dynamic anti-dive effects by inclining the pivot axes slightly downward as they go forward. “We seek a 100 percent correction of braking dive,” we were told, “depending on the weight of the car. While in America the front anti-dive is for braking only, at Citroën we also derive an ‘anti-plunge’ effect on acceleration. This is an advantage of our layout.
Nothing crude or old fashioned about this Citroën GS assembly plant. SM receives the same attention to detail.As a 90-degree V6 the Maserati C114-1 engine—as it’s officially known—is unusually arranged; most vee-sixes have used the 60-degree included angle. Altieri’s choice produced an engine that’s light at 308 pounds and remarkably short at only 12% inches end to end, and one that could also be adapted to future volume-production tooling for both the V6 and the staple Maserati V8’s.
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