Both of us are laughing as we cross the finish line. It’s that kind of car. It makes you smile when you walk up to it and then, as it turns out, involuntarily vocalise that smile when you get behind the wheel. I’m sitting up high in the surprisingly small cockpit of a genuine 1990 Paris-Dakar Citroën ZX Rally Raid Evo 2 and I’ve just had my shortest ever run up the Goodwood hill.
Not by much, but I cut straight across the grass at turn two and nicked a bit out of the inside of Molecomb as well. Why go the long way if you’ve got twin shocks at each corner and enough ride height to clear a snoozing camel?
Sitting to my right is Alex Easthope, who does marketing for Girardo & Co, which has just sold the ZX after a full restoration. He asked if he could join me and I was more than happy to have the company. After all, it seems appropriate to have a co-driver in something like this. Someone to play Berglund or Gallagher to my Vatanen or Salonen (we can all dream). What I hadn’t realised when I said yes was that this was his first trip up the hill. Thankfully I didn’t require any pace notes and equally pleasingly he seemed to enjoy losing his Goodwood virginity, despite professing to be a bad passenger.
