Peugeot 205 GTI Dimma
I've always had a 'thing' for the Peugeot 205 T16. A cherished model example I've had since I was seven adorns my desk, I had a book with a tasty cutaway drawing of one on the centrefold when I was a kid, and even in the Nineties Group B rallying was still a strong enough cultural memory to keep its flame alive – plus it was still winning the Dakar. As the last car to win a World Rally Championship under Group B rules, it had a reputation as the pinnacle of rallying achievement.
So imagine my excitement, as an impressionable ten-year-old, when a neighbour took delivery of one.
The operative word there is 'impressionable', mainly because the car in question was nothing of the sort, but rather a 205 GTi fitted with a Dimma bodykit. Of course I had absolutely no idea of this at the time – especially as the owner in question had seemingly replaced all the windows with giant Ray-Ban lenses so you couldn't see whether it had an engine in the back or not. It was also bright red – at the time I didn't know that all Peugeot's factory T16 road cars were finished in grey.
But somehow that didn't matter, because the sight of it made my day. And here's the thing – it still does.
Dimma somehow managed to extricate themselves from the early-Nineties Max Power malaise with a strange degree of dignity. I think it's simply because rather than going for the silly paint jobs, ugly for-the-sake-of-it body alterations and inappropriate wheels, their wide-bodied kits with faux-vents hinting at a mid-mounted engine – for the Peugeot 205 and Renault 5 – simply replicated the Group B versions line-for-line. Also, because they were still a hot Peugeot or Renault at heart, there was the sense that although they were 'fakes' there was something more 'honest' about them than, say, a Toyota MR2 made to look like a Ferrari F355. As a rubbernecker, you were being charmed rather than conned.
Dimma were also well aware that performance needed to match looks too, so they offered a Turbo Technics engine upgrade as an option as part of their bodywork conversion. The result is that this 205 GTi boasts straight-line performance capable of worrying a TVR.
The result is a genuine period curio that deserves to be cherished and preserved as a 'genuine Dimma', rather than pulled apart and returned to factory standard. Because such things were once a major part of aftermarket hot hatch culture when such cars were visited with a youthful second lease of life, and Dimma represented the most positive, acceptable face of it all in its pre-laddish heyday. To pretend that era never happened and lose the better examples to over-zealous value-chasing restorers would be a real shame.