Take one Citroen 2CV, lift it and stuff two motors into it, point it at the Atlas Mountains and go rallying…and it could be yours.
Anything that’s built in a shed is gonna be a ripper, right? Enter this Franken-2CV. It’s the brainchild of Jack Hanon, a mad scientist of a car builder who’d dreamed of racing in the Rallye de l’Atlas but didn’t have the cash to buy something off the shelf.
The thing he built needed to be tough because the 1800-mile long Rallye de l’Atlas was no walk in the park. It took Hanon more than 3000 hours to build his twin-engined 2CV.
So, what is it? It’s a cut and shut of two Citroen Ami frames with two tweaked 1.3L Citroen GSA four pots at either end and connected together. Thumping out a combined 130hp, these twin engines offer a staggering 500% increase in grunt than the original motors.
Both engines kept their transmissions with a shared gear lever and a single clutch pedal to control them.
All of the fibreglass panels can be raised to get access to the complicated setup. It’s running coil springs right around and disc brakes front and back and boasts 12-inches of clearance.
Legend goes that after he’d finished building his monster, Hanon drove it around Paris with a sign hanging off it calling for sponsors. He was eventually sponsored by an underwear brand…with some money in his pocket he headed off to the Rallye de l’Atlas.
Hanon and his wife spent a decade rallying the thing before he moved to Canada and passed away in 1990. The 2CV was eventually sold and completely restored and is now up for auction with Bonhams and is expected to fetch between $25,000 – $45,000.
Hanon’s twin-engine 2CV isn’t unique. Citroen itself built more than 600 of the things only theirs were a lot less powerful. And the motors weren’t linked in the same way as Hanon’s. Rather they were totally independent of each other meaning the things were both front-, rear-, and all-wheel drive all at the same time; they ran separate transmissions and fuel tanks too.
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