The genius of the Tolman Peugeot 205 GTI | GRR

Indeed in all that time, I have felt just one stab of remorse at letting it go and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it coincided with the first time I’d driven another since letting mine go.

I should say now that – as a few of my friends have discovered – buying a 205 GTI can be a fraught business. For reasons not entirely clear to me, they appear to endure neglect remarkably well, and therefore respond better than they should to being tarted up for sale. So you buy a car that looks good, seems to drive ok, or maybe just needs one or two things attending to. Only later does it transpire that it’s a bucket of bits that’ll bleed you white.

Which is why I know how lucky I got with mine. I bought it from a bloke whom I met by a lock-up near the Wandsworth Bridge roundabout, and log book aside, it came with not the smallest slightest scrap of history; not even a yellowing fuel receipt. I had to take the word of a man I had never met about a car whose past was unknown. And, idiot that I was, I still went and bought it. And, like I said, got very, very lucky. 

On a quick test drive. it reminded me instantly of the one I’d had in my youth and that was enough. I drove it home that night and took it to specialists Pug1Off the following week, who crawled all over it and said they hadn’t seen one that nice with that many miles on it for a very long time. Pure, unadulterated luck to make up in some very small part for all the basket cases I’ve bought over the years.

The car I drove a couple of weeks back looked exactly the same as mine, save the colour of its paint. Mine was a completely standard car which, it seemed by its appearance, so was this. Except it was anything but. This was the Tolman 205 GTI and apart from a couple of discreet Tolman badges on the outside and an (optional) electronic dash that mimics precisely the layout, typeface and content of the original clocks, you would really struggle to tell the difference.

But different they are. Very different indeed. Under the bonnet, you’ll find half a 405 Mi-16 engine bolted to the other end of a 306 GTI-6, with forged internals and power said to have been raised from just under 130bhp, to around 200bhp. It has a Quaife limited-slip differential, uprated, suspension, brakes… the works.

And yet, its character is essentially the same as my old car. Ok, the engine is not quite so smooth and its back end is rather better contained, but the whip crack gearchanges, the fabulous steering feel, that sense that so long as you can get it turned in whatever happens next can just be sorted out, and above all that wonderful, carefree spirit of the original has been retained. It’s just been reborn on a level beyond the imagining of a 30-year-old standard 205.

I struggle slightly to see 200bhp, because that would put its power-to-weight ratio on a par with a Porsche Cayman and it never felt that fast, but it still felt rapid in a way a 205 has not since I tested a Turbo Technics car toting a Garrett T3 puffer three decades ago. And unlike that then, which was otherwise unmodified, this one has the grip, the poise and brakes to go with its extra urge.

It was a hoot but of all its many attributes, what I thought cleverest, most admirable and, in its own way, most enjoyable was the fact it looked so completely innocent. Weighing around 900kg and with that set up, on a decent road it would sit on the rear bumper of almost any modern fast hatch you care to name, the driver of one looking more incredulous by the minute, as the smile broadened ever further on the face of the other. When I rule the world, I’ll be offering tax breaks for all restomods so sympathetically enhanced.

There is but one problem. If you want your Tolman 205 to have all the tricks – the engine, the diff, the dash and so on – it’ll cost you £125,000. On top of everything else you do get a fully restored 205 GTI for this, but what you won’t get is a donor car – that’s just the price of the modifications. So it could end up costing you not a lot less than the list price of a brand new Porsche 911 GT3. And while the Tolman 205 is a far better car than my own lamented 205 late of this parish, and while it is a really, really good example of its art, it’s not that good. Not, at least, to me.