Les Grands Rêves - Citroën Visa Lotus

In the 1980s, rallying was getting out of control. The Group B era was in its prime, cars were getting more powerful each year, and with the boosted performance, also more dangerous. Many big players in the automotive industry were using it as a method of showing the world what they could do, and Citroën wanted to get in on the act. Their vehicle of choice? The quaint little Visa.

The French supermini was born in 1978 and had a production run spanning 10 years, with a facelift in 1981 and all manufacture ceasing in 1988 with over 1,250,000 examples built. It was a lightweight FWD car, offering mostly 4-cylinder petrol engines (1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6) with a single diesel option (1.8) and an unusual 652cc flat-2 cylinder petrol at the bottom of the range.

Before their attempt to participate in the World Rally Championship, Citroën had used the Visa in the under 1300cc class to great success. The Visa Trophée was developed for this purpose, using the Visa Super X as the bssis. The Trophée was front wheel drive with 150HP squeezed ou of the carbureted 4-banger, this combination worked excellently for the little car and helped the Trophée gain popularity in France and the UK for its abilities in motorsport.

The Lotus partnership was in order to develop a car to rival the Renault 5 Turbo on the Group B WRC stage. There wasn’t a huge amount Lotus could do to spice up the rather lacklustre performance of the regular car, so instead they simply took an Esprit Turbo, changed the body shell to that of a Visa and modified it to fit the chassis. The new car had a 2.1 litre turbocharged inline-4 producing in excess of 200HP mated to a 5-speed manual transmission from a Citroën SM, making the mid-engined hatchback quite the handful. As the finished product only weighed about one tonne, the turbocharged powerplant should have made it a thing to behold on the rally stage, right?

Wrong.

As the vehicle was set up like a sports car, the mish-mash of sports car and supermini was an absolute dog on the dirt, leading Citroën to decide it was not fit to race. They took it back to the drawing board, but before they could resolve the issues that plagued the thing, Audi had unleashed the Quattro, and Group B rallying’s RWD machines were sent packing. With only 2 prototypes created, Citroën axed the project entirely.

The little Citroën that had such big dreams was shot down by poor development and left behind in terms of technology. Thanks for reading my [short] article!