Adey.
ClioSport Club Member
CULT OF MACHINE NIGHTS | SEPTEMBER EVENTS | TUESDAY NIGHTS | WHAT'S ON
Belle Voiture – 12 September
Tickets https://caffeineandmachine.com/whats-on/belle-voiture/
French cars are strange. We mean this in the nicest possible way.
As a nation, France has always specialised in a few distinct genres of cars. There are the people’s cars – it’s hard to picture a French scene without a well-worn Renault 4 or Citroen 2CV puttering amongst the vineyards or sitting outside a café on a cobbled Parisian street.
France also knows how to build a killer hot hatch. If you subscribe to the most traditional definition – a common-or-garden hatchback warmed over and given some sporty accoutrements – then they invented the genre with the Simca 1100 TI, and from the legendary Peugeot 205 GTi to the reign of the Renault Megane RS as the driver’s hatch of choice, they’ve been knocking it out of the park ever since.
Then there’s arguably the most distinctly French genre of car – big, comfortable wafters with a uniquely gallic flair about them. Citroen are excellent at these: from the original and always-magnificent DS, to the deeply strange but deeply wonderful Maserati-powered SM, to the C6 of the mid-2000s that staunchly swum against the mainstream German tide. It’s not just Citroen, though – the wonderful failure that was the Renault Avantime is a perfect example.
France has produced some brilliant sports cars, too, from the current car journalists’ darling, the Alpine A110, to several decades worth of record-breaking Bugattis.
The team from Alpine Centre Banbury are kindly bringing along some of the current A110 range to show off for the evening, too.
Belle Voiture is a celebration of the beauty, the brilliance and the downright strangeness of French cars. Come join us from 5pm on Tuesday 12 September.
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