The French Connection
By Mike Kovac · June 12, 2026 · The Auto Snob
The key to life is to never let greater ambitions stand in the way of distraction. I say that with tongue in cheek, but really it was an ethos that served to underscore my adolescent years with alarming accuracy. It was not entirely my fault; sometimes fate has a way of controlling your destiny, and at the tender age of 5, I found myself helpless and enamored, rolling around in the back seat of a Citroën GS, a not so keen observer of the rural countryside in the South of France that has inspired painters, poets and other people of cultural prominence for centuries, probably longer. But not me. I was, of course, completely enraptured by the teardrop shape, part futurism / part art deco dash and weird hydropneumatics - this car would raise itself when started like the spaceship that it was - of the GS. And my adolescent mind could not possibly be expected to contemplate any of the language, culture or history that this wonderful country had to offer because I was too absorbed in the eccentricities of the Citroën to notice. My parents were nothing if not persistent, and subsequent attempts to broaden my cultural horizons with trips to Paris, Deauville and Nice failed spectacularly, each one bombing slightly worse than the last. Instead, by the age of 15, I was obsessed with all things Citroën, Peugeot, Renault, Alpine and Matra and still completely unfluent in French. In fact, there may have been a moment when I thought the Citroën CX Turbo 2 was the best car to ever serve mankind. It was purely speculative of course, as I was deprived the opportunity to ever actually ride in my hero car. This was in spite of the fact that the streets of Paris were littered with them as taxis, but I knew right then in there after seeing one ejected from the mouth of Grace Jones (in what is still arguably the best commercial ever made) that I would someday have to validate my belief. Someday equated to roughly 25 years later when I found myself in the doldrums of a …