Rare yellow Peugeot 205 Rallye for sale

Peugeot doesn’t do performance cars any more. Not really, anyway. A quick flick through its website reveals there are just three ‘Peugeot Sport’ models, two of which are variants of the 508 PSE, which is comfortably the warmest thing the company makes but hardly boils the mercury. And the other is the 9X8 Le Mans car. Which you can’t buy, nor would you want to based on recent form. And although the underrated 208 GTI was on sale not that long ago, the new generation supermini has forgone a hot version in favour of electrification. 

That’s a whole can of worms we don’t intend on opening, but a near-complete lack of performance models in its range is obviously frustrating, particularly the absence of an affordable hot hatch. This is the company that mastered the class, with the 205 GTI laying the foundations of hot puggery for the best part of two decades. And then there were the Rallyes. Most companies create cheaper ‘warm’ models to sit below their flagship performance offerings (think ST to RS, GTI to R and so on), whereas Peugeot would take one of its hatchbacks from the production line, strip its interior, give it a rally-inspired paint job and slot it in right below its GTI range-topper. The Rallyes weren’t just a watered-down hot hatch, they were proper lightweight performance cars.

Peugeot’s genius Rallye line began with the 205, similar(ish) to the one you see here. After the raving success of the GTI, the company decided a cheaper alternative was needed to hoover up those hungry for a hot hatch on a tighter budget. So the firm called on its racing squad, Peugeot-Talbot Sport, to create a rally-inspired hatch that wouldn’t step on the toes of the GTI. To keep costs down, a regular TU-series engine (as opposed to the GTI’s XU motor) was plucked from the 205 production line, bored out to 1.3 litres and fitted with a set of racier cams and dual Weber carburettors. Power was rated at 103hp, peppy enough for a sports model back in the mid-’80s, and 15hp shy of the 1.6-litre GTI. 

That said, the Rallye was quite a bit lighter than the GTI. Much of the sound-deadening was discarded, and it chucked out most of the electrical bits (a blessing from a classic ownership standpoint) and simplified the heating system, bringing the Rallye down to a kerb weight of just 793kg – 57kg less than the 1.6 GTI. Talbot Sport could have left it there, but instead opted to carry over the suspension, as well as the brakes and rear axle from the GTI. The hot hatch’s hardware combined with a revvy four-pot and sublime, featherweight chassis gave rise to what some consider to be the best-handling front-wheel drive car ever conceived – if not a particularly quick one.

This, however, isn’t one of the Euro-grade 205 Rallyes, of which over 30,000 were produced, it’s one of just 800 right-hand drive models built for the UK market. These admittedly weren’t quite as spritely as their European counterparts, packing a larger (yet less powerful) 1.4-litre engine and doing away with much of the GTI hardware, though it was still a rev-hungry, lightweight 205 that looked every bit as cool as those on the other side of the channel. More so, in fact, as while Euro cars were only offered in white, ours could be also had in blue and yellow, of which only 80 and 250 were produced respectively.

As you can see, it’s the latter that’s up for sale here, sporting a similar look to Peugeot’s epic Dakar and Pikes Peak challengers from the mid-80s. This one’s in especially good nick, having undergone a pricey restoration four years ago, including a respray and replacement interior panels, in order to return it to its former glory. The asking price is £10,995, which makes it just a smidgen cheaper than the 1.6 GTIs currently for sale, just as it would have been 30 years ago. Probably wouldn’t cost the moon to bring it up to European spec, either…