Opinion: should you ever own your hero... if it’s a Citroen SM?

The day you become the owner of a Citroen SM should be a good day. It is a stunning creation. Elegant yet bewildering, ingenious yet flawed, prescient yet ultimately a dead end – the SM is genuinely unique and almost impossible to describe. Other than to say it is wilfully, brilliantly, infuriatingly and gloriously French. So, so French. But it has an Italian (Maserati) engine. Like I said, the SM confounds at every turn. It is something else entirely.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the SM, I’d encourage you to have a poke around the web and drink in the sheer insanity of it all. The short version is that it’s a front-engined GT car launched in 1970 that built on the innovations of the DS saloon and combined them with Maserati power, since the French firm had acquired the Italian blue blood in 1968. Its 2.7-litre V6 was built by Maserati, masterminded by Giulio Alfieri – whose previous work included the V8 powering the 250F F1 car – and powered the front wheels through a 5spd manual.

The engine snarls like an old prototype sportscar, but the hydropneumatic suspension soaks up bumps better than a modern Rolls-Royce. There’s an unbelievably pointy fully hydraulic power steering system (power operated, not power assisted) with variable weighting yet the car rolls ferociously in corners, so you have to be impossibly delicate with inputs. Oh, and the brake ‘pedal’ is really a mushroom-shaped button that acts like a switch. The interior is somewhere between chic Parisian smoking lounge and the waiting room for intergalactic travel as imagined in the late 1960s.

At the front, six headlights are encased behind curved glass that runs the entire width of the car. The innermost pair turn with the wheels. Its teardrop shape and abrupt Kamm tail create an extremely low drag shape and rock solid, high speed stability. The hydraulic front/rear brake balance adjusts according to the load of the car and under heavy braking the whole car squats rather than the nose diving. It’s a surreal experience. Not because everything is so different, but rather because it all starts to feel natural so quickly. Citroen reimagined every dynamic facet of a car and, incredibly, came up with a pretty convincing alternative.

Of course, they caught fire. And the aircon was driven from the same timing chain that controlled the camshafts and could seize the engine. And it was ruinously expensive, plus the rear seats are tiny and, well, the list goes on. But the SM is properly, genuinely extraordinary. And now I own one. Or part own one, at least.

But that rueful day wasn’t a good one. The SM was my dad’s and now he’s gone. Nothing, in his mind, could match the SM. His father bought a new SM back in 1971 and ever since he’d dreamed of having a Maserati powered Citroen. When he finally achieved his ambition, the reality somehow exceeded all those years of anticipation. It provided him with joy on every journey. He read books about the SM. He peered at it in the garage in the winter. Polished it in the summer. And drove it whenever he could. We should all be so lucky to find our version of the SM. The car that perfectly matches our passion and feeds our addiction. We’ll look after her, Dad.