GTbyCitroen hits Harrods

Knightsbridge is a playground, and every playground has a bully. Today we are the bully.
The conversation goes something like this:

“Eeeurgh, what’s that?”
“It’s my Bugatti Veyron.”
“Your what?”
“Bugatti Veyron.”
“Well it looks s**t.”

There aren’t many opportunities to do this so it needs to be done right. Citroen has lent us its GT concept, official name ‘GTbyCitroen’, which it is never going to be called again here for obvious reasons.

There's also a video here: hear the GTbyCitroen roar...

This car was designed to exist in a virtual world and could therefore afford to look like something Buck Rogers found in his wife’s bedside drawer. So unbelievable was it, however, that Citroen felt compelled to build it for real.

It’s still just a concept, and isn’t for sale, and doesn’t do the warp speeds that its binary existence lays claim to, but it is still fast, noisier than the Apocalypse and more astonishing to behold than anything this side of your own near-death experience. Certainly more so than a Bugatti Veyron. Even a chrome one.

So what do you do when you have your hands on a car like this? You use it to burst some bubbles. And where do you go to do this? Harrods. Clambering down into the GT and thumping the heavy scissor to, the twisting layers of angular copper that dominate the cockpit evoke Jules Verne’s Nautilus, that Victorian interpretation of technology and progress where the might of ancient industry collides with the delicacy and mystery of tomorrow’s unknown. Red strip lighting slices past the cold, solid metal, sinister and faintly suggestive, and those hands seem to be trembling ever so slightly as they come to rest on the small, Batmobile steering wheel.

When the engine fires, it does so with a concussive roar that sets off car alarms for yards in every direction. It’s a frightening, painful sound from within or without and the prospect of a run-in with the law seems inevitable. Sure enough, within moments the Met are alongside, gesturing from the open window of a marked-up 5-Series. With no means of lowering our window the scissor door has to go up. This is so amusing to them that they quickly wave us on, reassured by the promise that the car is road legal (probably, we think) and will be on its way back to Paris by nightfall either way.

There's also a video here: hear the GTbyCitroen roar...

Spearing the GT off towards Hyde Park Corner, every head on the busy pavements turns to track our progress. The gearbox hisses and slaps and the road reels past, a silent movie beyond the sharply raked screen and our screaming auditorium. As the World’s Biggest Cornershop heaves into view, the hurried commuter turns static spectator, stopping dead in his tracks, mouth agape. But he is not why we’re here. The prey in this particular spot is an extraordinary über-class of impossibly wealthy people for whom Harrods is the new Mecca.

The oil-rich nations of the Middle East have spawned a generation of chronically spoilt and bored young men who literally haven’t got enough hours in the day and days in their lives to spend the interest on the savings that are bursting out of their (dads’) bank accounts. So nowadays they do things like buy Bugatti Veyrons (please note the plural) to drive languidly around their fiefdoms in first and second gear, stopping off  for coffee every hour or so until they want to die.

And then it gets really hot – we’re talking 40 degrees in high summer – and the pavement between a Veyron and a coffee shop looks like a long walk when you’re already sweating into your Prada Y-fronts, and they start to wish they were somewhere cooler.

So they get Dad or Uncle or whoever it is that owns the local airline to fly the Veyrons over to London so they can drive round Harrods in what, by their standards, is the Tundra, stopping whenever they feel like it to get a coffee and a parking ticket that they don’t need to pay because the Veyrons are registered in Qatar or wherever. Madness as this may seem, it’s a routine occurrence, and this is reliable territory on any given day to see a good four or five million quid’s worth of foreign-plated supercars.

So we park the GT right outside Harrods on the corner where it encourages al fresco dining for the privileged few, and wait to see if we can’t show some of these guys up. With a Citroen. Parking tickets already adorn a white and chrome Veyron and an all-white Panamera Turbo that has been embarrassed further by FAB Design. But the traffic warden just stares at the GT and then wanders off in a bit of a daze. It seems there are limits even for him.

There's also a video here: hear the GTbyCitroen roar...

A mid-blue Lamborghini LP-640 SV burbles past the throng of men, women and children that have swarmed upon the Citroen. No one even notices the Lamborghini. Not that one, nor the orange one that follows, tailing a yellow 458 Italia. Then a bright red Phantom Drophead passes, three swarthy young men in a bizarre array of baseball caps and catwalk bling staring grimly from within, their heads turning towards us in one slow, synchronised movement. Shortly afterwards a white Mercedes SLS AMG struggles to squeeze through a narrowing gap as people begin spilling right across the road.

Eventually the proprietors of the Veyron and Panamera appear together, combined age about 14, and get into their cars unnoticed. They fire them up and pull into the near standstill of black cabs and bodies, no one paying any heed as they nudge round the corner, out of sight, out of mind.

Then a tangible victory of sorts: the man who runs errands for the owner of several Pagani Zondas approaches us. His boss would like to buy the car, money no object. It is not for sale, we say, but would be easily two million as is, in concept form, without working windows, or aircon, or any spare parts in the real world. Not a problem he says. His boss would like to buy the car.

Suddenly there is a small explosion. A cabbie has taken his eye off the ball and crashed into the kerb, popping his tyre. Another Veyron goes past the stricken cab, on English plates and in a nice dark two-tone grey, but no one notices an understated Veyron in a street where no one is noticing a chrome one. Yet another LP-640 appears. It might have been red. Or a different blue actually. Even we’ve stopped noticing.

The kerbside chaos gives rise to reflection. The purpose of this strange exercise rests upon one particular given: that part, if not all, of the reason why you fly your multi-million-dollar garage of delivery mileage hypercars half way round the world, only to sit in traffic jams, is to impress girls. Why else would you drive them round and round the poshest shop in the world rather than a track? It’s a mating ritual if ever there was one.

And you can see why they bother. The girls who go shopping in Knightsbridge on a sultry Monday afternoon in mid-summer aren’t really girls at all. Nor are they women. They’re of alien extraction. Impeccable in every facet, so expensive even to the untrained eye that they ought to have an honesty box attached to them somewhere, probably made by Fendi, into which you can drop a couple of quid out of quiet appreciation.

A maintenance donation if you will. Like the British Museum. Unfortunately today is not a good day for the bum-fluffed Veyron owners of this world to get laid. Because Citroen is in town. The girls look only at the GT on their way into Harrods from behind their big sunglasses. They look at the energised haunches in that permanent crouch, past the scissor doors to the swathes of polished copper in the cockpit.

There's also a video here: hear the GTbyCitroen roar...

And they swish their hair a bit and pout in their otherwise expressionless faces. But the aforementioned mating ritual is fatally flawed, because, if we’re honest, the girls don’t really give a toss about the GT or the Veyrons. We’re just interfering with the tissue-thin expectations of a handful of rich, pubescent middle-easterners by holding the trump card in a woefully fallacious hand; the one that maintains your chances of sex are directly proportional to the type of car you’ve got.

And in this not-quite-scientific experiment, the only people genuinely attracted to a supercar doing less than 5mph are teenage boys. Maybe there’s something in that. Ancient civilisations were once very much ahead of the curve.

However murky the motive, there’s no refuting the travesty of so much time, money and carbon being wasted turning supercars into fashion accessories. We may have momentarily meddled with this idiocy with the GT, but these cars will be back tomorrow. And the next day. So if you want a supercar, do like Citroen does and have it in the virtual world. Here they look better, get driven further and are just as unlikely to find you sex.

Now watch the video