The Citroen BX 4TC: a car so awesome, Citroen wants to destroy it.

Car of the Week is back after a long hiatus, and we start right away with another car you don’t know.

Imagine the scene. It’s 1986, Group B rallying is in full bloom yet quickly and unknowingly approaching death (Bear this in mind) as Citroen wants a piece of the action. Their last efforts using the Citroen Visa have not been that successful. What to do? The obvious solution was to take your large car, the BX pictured above, and transform it into this:

What you’re looking at now is a BX in name only, it has 200 hp thanks to a Peugeot 505 engine, unless of course it was the Evolution model, in which case it had 380 hp. 0-60 was dealt with in just 7.5 seconds, be it on tarmac, dirt or snow, and thanks to regulations we got 200 road legal modes.

All of these combined made one of the most disappointing failures for Citroen.

For one,  it wasn’t very fast, there was no denying that the plant was just a tuned mid-size Peugeot engine, its best result ever was 6th place in Sweden. Even if it had turned out to have some potential, it never got the chance to show it. On May 2, 1986, Henri Toivonen’s fatal crash at the French rally put an untimely end to Group B rallying. Citroen themselves wanted no one to remember their failure so they tried to scrap every single 4TC out of shame.

I’m glad they failed at that, a car as mad as this should be remembered, even though its unknown how many 4TC’s survive to this day, they are extremely rare. Interestingly though, they’re pretty cheap. The last 4TC sold had an asking price of 28,500 euros.

I wonder how much he could have got if he’d tried to sell it to Citroen.

Image credit:

Citroen BX: Wikimedia Commons

Group B Citroen BX 4TC: CitSportSite

Road legal Citroen BX 4TC: KlausNahr / CC BY-SA 2.0