If you haven’t put the Carlisle Import Nationals on your calendar this year, now might not be a bad time to start making plans. And I don’t care what you have going on at the end of May, and whose graduation your relatives are guilting you into traveling to. Your cousin Scarlet can graduate from Oberlin just fine without your presence at the commencement. Let me put it this way, would you rather sit for three hours straight listening to the speech of that one alum who wrote that one book, or would you rather gawk at the little green grenades under the hood of a Citroen SM as its owner gives an impromptu seminar on Citroen SM maintenance? I think all hoons would agree that if you suddenly came down a bad case of Scurvy or Whooping Cough and had to go see a scurvologist specialist in 16th century diseases in Carlisle Pennsylvania on May 17th through the 19th, your relatives would understand.
Each year Carlisle hosts a wide variety of French machinery, often from five or six marques in total, and the Peugeot contingent has always been quite impressive. This Peugeot 505 started out in life with a gas engine but was recently converted to Peugeot’s own turbodiesel engine (in what must have been one of three engine swaps on Peugeots that took place in the US that year). This car actually received quite a bit of work in the year preceding its appearance at Carlisle, which made it all the more tragic that this 505 was totaled in an accident just a week after its appearance at Carlisle. The owner walked away from that crash without a scratch, but the car was not salvageable.
The 505 wagon represented the bulk of Peugeot sales in the US towards the end of the 1980s. A model that was rapidly falling behind its competitors in terms of technology, the 505 made up for that with ease of maintenance and a sheer ruggedness.
Just yesterday I drove a 1992 Peugeot 505 DL wagon with 235,000 on the clock, and was pleasantly surprised to find the car in great mechanical condition despite the wear and tear of 21 years and 235,000 not-particularly-mellow miles on New England’s roads. (Not that there’s anything wrong with New England’s roads).
The Peugeot contingent at Carlisle has never failed to surprise. In the last couple years we saw not only a late-model 406 Coupe, but rare Pew-joes such as a 604 sedan, a 405 wagon, a 504 sedan, and even an early 203 sedan. Add to that a wide selection of 505 sedans and wagons, which make up a majority of Pugs at Carlisle. The Carlisle Import Nationals is actually the east coast event at which you’re likely to see the greatest number of Peugeots, Best of France and Italy being the west coast event.
I’ll just leave this here. See you at the show!
[Images: Copyright 2013 Hooniverse/Jay Ramey]
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