I encountered Gérard Welter a few times over the years, at Peugeot design presentations of imminent new models and once, entirely coincidentally, when I was walking along Paris's Champs-Elysée while on a summer holiday. He was instantly recognisable with his metal-rimmed glasses and shock of white, mad-professor hair. But the time I got to meet him properly was in 2006, the year before he retired from Peugeot (but not from running his racing team, which continued with Zytek, rather than Peugeot, engines up to 2010).
Peugeot was staging a press event at the banked Montlhéry circuit, a history-soaked venue on the outskirts of Paris. It was a gathering of the company's motor-show concept cars over the years, all of which we could drive because at that time Peugeot insisted that its concept cars should work. The man who made them do so was an extraordinarily creative – and slightly mad – engineer called Jean-Christophe Bolle-Reddat, who I had previously encountered when I drove his Ferrari 550-like Peugeot 907 concept with a V12 engine made out of two Peugeot V6s joined together.
This car required its Windows Mobile computer system to reboot every time the car was started, which was a worry when the 907 stalled half-way across a busy Route Nationale with a truck bearing down, but Bolle-Reddat liked living on the edge. Similarly risky, you would think, was letting a photographer and me explore the roads near Charles de Gaulle Airport in the one and only concept prototype of the Peugeot RCZ coupé with nothing more than a promise to bring it back in half an hour. He'd chipped the turbo engine, too, to make it more fun.
Anyway, at Montlhéry there was also present a car rather significant in Peugeot's history, brought there because it set a string of diesel-car records on that circuit in 1965. It was a Peugeot 404 Cabriolet, converted into a streamlined single-seater speed machine with the cockpit enclosed at waistline leve, a bubble canopy for the driver and a 68bhp diesel motor. The bright blue 404 lapped the circuit for 72 hours over 11,627.329km at an average of 100.37mph.
I had made tentative pre-event arrangements to have a go in the record-breaker for a magazine feature, but bad news awaited me. 'It is not working,' declared Bolle-Reddat, sadly. 'It has a bad water leak.'