Citroen DS3R driven

Giant, sharp arrows raging their way across the roof. Acres of stencilled-on lettering in a scary, quasi-military typeface. Chequered flags on the flanks. And on the dash another pair of arrows aimed, bizarrely and slightly sinisterly, at the passenger’s groin. An orange roof, orange wheels, red brake calipers and genuine carbon-fibre spoilers and arch extensions. This might be kinda fun on a concept car, but if you had to drive this thing through your own town every day, it’d be a bit like going out wearing well-padded underpants outside your trousers.

Words: Paul Horrell
Photography: Lee Brimble

This feature was originally published in the January issue of Top Gear magazine

OK, OK, the sticker set is an option, and if the orange wheels are a bit much for you, there's always an alternative white body with dark-grey roof and wheels. But, even so, the visual messages here are very clear. This car is hardcore, it's focused and loud and proud and it's obviously not going to suffer fools. It's the nearest thing going to Sébastien Loeb's brand-new World Rally car.

Well, you're just going to have to ignore those visual messages. The first mile you drive tells you this isn't a car that'll bite your arm off. It feels at first remarkably like the regular 150bhp DS3 Sport that I drive every day. The ride is stiffer, sure, but not punishing. And at town speeds, it's not harsh and the suspension doesn't clang. It rounds off the worst of the potholes.

The Racing is so called because it was developed by engineers at the company's rally division, Citroen Racing. To get the engine up to 207bhp, they fitted a bigger turbo. This is usually a recipe for lag, and then an unpredictable explosion of boost. Not this time. The engine burbles sweetly and responsively through the mid ranges. It's got a bit more torque, but nothing to write home about: change up at 4,000, and you'd never spot the difference between this and the regular 150bhp version. The new exhaust flows more gas, as it must, but it isn't noisy. The Racing sails along the motorway with all the civility of the car it's based on.

After that first mile, you're wondering why this car is so large of mouth yet so apparently small of trouser. To find out, get some revs up, and find some empty corners.

At high revs, this engine properly delivers. It's not manically peaky, but you definitely know it's packing 207bhp, and it's all you can do to avoid repeatedly clouting the red line. Citroen claims 0-62mph in 6.5 seconds, and I don't doubt it. It's a lot of engine for a car that weighs 1,250kg. And the speed washes away under the middle pedal, which is connected to big discs with four-piston Brembo calipers that give precision and feedback as well as force.

So, the first corner you come to, the car darts into the arc with plenty of wit and enthusiasm. You probably didn't go fast enough. The 215/40 18 tyres are sticky for a car this light, and the stout brakes probably knocked off more speed than you planned. This isn't the normal DS3, after all. Faster next time, please.

Then you find heaps of grip. How much ultimately I cannot say, because my drive was mostly cold, greasy and wet, and when it wasn't, it was foggy and slushy. But this I know: the steering is a little work of genius. For a start, despite the bigger tyres, torque steer and tramlining are rarely issues. But isolating those things is easy if you calibrate the power steering - especially this new-fangled, and usually numb, electric sort - to isolate everything else. That hasn't happened here. There's a sense of connectedness withthe tyres, of what grip exists and what slip is incipient. I found myself driving it in these frankly lousy conditions with a confidence that made me warm inside. Overdo it and just lift the throttle: the front end will tuck in and the back tyres will take more of their share. It isn't a knife-edge car - again, not the car its looks suggest it is. It's reactive, but it looks after you.

As speed rises on a bumpy stretch, the damping really begins to breathe. It also keeps nicely composed over crests and dips. You can feel the expertise of the Citroen Racing engineers here - a rally car lives or dies by its ability to shrug off the commotion of the surface beneath it without getting knocked off-course. In a road car, it brings a lovely feeling of control, and a comfort that's satisfyingly precise - the aristocratic dampers are better able to quash small residual shudders, so the whole car feels better put together than the standard one. Besides which, bumps don't send your body bouncing around the place, because the Racing's enormo-bucket seats hug you fondly into the bosom of the car's movements.

The engineer responsible, Cyrille Jourdan, lays out the targets for the DS3 Racing. For starters, they wanted, and got, efficiency: more than 200bhp with less than 150g/km of CO2 - an emissions number that equates to 44.1mpg, which is better than the Mini Cooper S Works and, oddly, better than the DS3 150 too. Next target: to have a chassis as good as a Clio RenaultSport, and a powertrain as good as the Cooper S Works. But what must have gone right against the grain for a bunch of rally-car builders, they weren't allowed to find speed by chucking away the heavy but congenial equipment. The air-conditioning, the hi-fi speakers, the back seat, the soundproofing and carpet, it all had to stay. This is still the top-of-the range DS3.

Not an easy job, then. To make life harder, they couldn't just drop in the 200-odd horsepower version of this engine that's in the Peugeot RCZ. The Peugeot has a bigger engine bay, and so its turbo is in a different place, its exhaust is a different shape, and so on. It just wouldn't be wedged safely under the DS3 hood. So they used the regular DS3 150 engine, and fitted a bigger turbo and recalibrated the injection and electronics, and put on a bigger exhaust with these most excellent 207bhp results.

One problem: it isn't a fully homologated engine, so they're not allowed to make more than 1,000. To be sneaky, they're doing another 1,000 with a completely different (oh yeah) engine giving 202bhp, but we won't get them in the UK. We're limited to just 200 cars. They're all at the full-fat 207. Which is nice, but, to be honest, the difference between 202 and 207 is smaller than you'd ever be able to tell, and probably smaller than car-to-car manufacturing tolerance.

The gear ratios stay the same as standard, and they work a treat - no messy gaps on mountain roads, but civilised sixth-gear cruising. There's a stronger clutch, though, and some internals in the gearbox have been heat-treated to carry the power more robustly. It's an extremely thorough job.

The chassis gets a wider track, courtesy of new 18-inch wheels, big enough to fit those large-diameter Brembos. The springs are stiffer, and lower by 15mm. The dampers - the best part, if you ask me - are new too. With this more rigorous spring and damper set, and the lower ride height, it turned out there was no need to change the anti-roll bars, so the basic understeer/oversteer balance doesn't alter either. There's simply more precision.

The engineers wanted a splitter to improve front-end aero and arch extensions to cover the big tyres. Then they realised they could make these mouldings more accurately in carbon fibre than in regular plastic, and that the tool-up cost for this limited run would be less. So, real carbon it is. The same stuff is also used around the cabin, trimming the steering wheel, centre console and even a little fillet around the door handles. The cabin carbon's all very nice, but what really matters is the pair of giant bear-hug front seats.

But now the crunch. Citroen is asking £23,100 for all this. Actually, for not quite all this. For all this, you have to add £800 for the satnav and, if you really do have an inferiority complex, £450 for the stickers. Whichever way you cut it, this is a breathtakingly ambitious increment over the sort of prices we're used to seeing on Citroen forecourts. 

What else would this sort of cash buy you? Well, there's the Mini Cooper S Works, but that, even more than the DS3 Racing, seems a bit over-egged. It's huge fun to drive, but the ride's borderline unacceptable, and there's no room in the back or boot. At the other extreme is the Golf GTI. Yes they're everywhere, and there's a reason for that. It's a brilliant car, super useful and super fun. But buying a Golf GTI hardly makes you a trail-blazer. The DS3 Racing is for people with a distaste for the obvious.

Its biggest trouble, no doubt, comes from RenaultSport. For this money, you can have nearly 50 more horses in the Megane 250. For £5k less, there's the Clio RenaultSport 200. The little Renault lacks a turbo, which means if you're to go fast you've got to be flailing at the gearlever like a man possessed. That's the fun of it: it's a bewitchingly precise and absorbing driving tool. But the rest of the time, it's a bit sparse. It's the car that you'd imagine the stickered-up DS3 Racing would be.

Instead, the Racing is something else. Not the thing it looks like, maybe, but nonetheless a thing we like very much.