Citroën Traction Avant

Flaminio Bertoni gave the Traction its shape, and Citroën's own telling has him modelling it in plasticine in a single night in 1933, a story the company still repeats and nobody has ever fully documented. What is beyond argument is what the monocoque let him do. With no ladder frame to sit on top of, the body dropped several inches, and the car reads as low and planted next to every upright saloon of 1934. The double chevron sits in a tall, narrow grille flanked by free-standing headlamps, with the starting handle hole beneath it. The nose then changed with the mechanicals: when the six-cylinder engine reversed its rotation for 1948 the crank shaft moved up, and the old hole was covered by a pair of chrome wings. In 1952 the boot was enlarged into the rounded shape enthusiasts call the malle bombée, and the spare wheel finally moved inside instead of hanging off the tail. Three wheelbases covered everything from the short Légère to the nine-seat Familiale. The 1934 show cars for the stillborn V8-engined 22CV wore the same body on a longer nose.

The Traction never became a racing car, and Citroën never really tried to make it one. What the company chased instead were endurance records, which suited a car whose entire argument was that it would not break. In July 1934, months before the bankruptcy, Tractions took five international class E records, including six days at an average of 111.183km/h and 10,000 miles in 14 hours 43 minutes 14 seconds. The same year a car covered the Tour of France and Belgium, 5,007km, in 77 hours, and ran the first Paris to Moscow and back postal link, 3,200km in eight days. The most extraordinary effort was François Lecot's. Between 22 July 1935 and 26 July 1936, under Automobile Club de France supervision, he drove a Traction roughly 400,000km, mostly back and forth between Paris and Monte Carlo, averaging about 1,000km every single day for a year. Tractions still turn out in numbers for the Rallye Monte-Carlo Historique, which is about the right kind of motorsport for them.

In France the Traction is not really a car, it is a period. The Gestapo requisitioned them during the occupation and used them for night arrests, so one stopping outside meant something specific and terrible. The same cars, recaptured and repainted with Free French markings, then carried the Resistance. After the liberation both meanings survived and a third arrived: Pierre Loutrel, Pierrot le Fou, ran an armed gang through 1946 that stole and used Tractions so consistently the French press simply called them the Gang des Tractions Avant. He shot himself by accident during a jewellery robbery on the avenue Kléber in November 1946, and for three years afterwards nobody knew he was dead. In Germany the car picked up the name Gangsterlimousine from the thrillers it kept turning up in. On screen it belongs to Maigret above all: Rupert Davies liked the Traction he drove in the 1960 to 1963 television series enough to buy it from the French rental company when filming ended, and the 2016 ITV revival with Rowan Atkinson filled its streets with them.

A Traction asks for attention on a schedule and repays it by simply carrying on. The two jobs that define ownership are greasing and oiling. The front driveshafts want a grease gun roughly every 600 miles, and the accepted figure is around 60 strokes, so you learn to keep the gun in the boot. Oil changes come every 1,500 miles on anything without the late 11D filter, which is most of them, because there is no filtration at all and no oil pressure gauge to warn you when something is going wrong. Owners who keep to both rarely have bottom-end trouble; owners who do not eventually hear the knock. The three-speed gearbox announces worn synchromesh by baulking on second and third or jumping out of gear. Six-volt electrics on the French and Belgian cars mean the starter wants a healthy battery and clean earths, while Slough-built cars got 12-volt Lucas equipment and are easier in that one respect. Rust is the only thing you cannot maintain your way out of, so a dry garage and a car that actually gets used are worth more than any amount of polish.