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Written by Jack Rix
You"re probably staring at this beaten up, tatty old Peugeot 206 and wondering why it"s tweaking a memory somewhere in the back of your brain. Try imagine it with a stirring Indian soundtrack. Still no? It is the star of quite possibly the greatest TV advert ever, and today we"re driving it.But first, a refresher. The advert in question, The Sculptor", filmed in Jaipur, India and released in 2003, stars a gentleman who sees a 206 ad in the paper and falls in love. But without sufficient funds to buy one, he sets about driving his Hindustan Ambassador into a wall, getting an elephant to sit on it and welding through the night to produce his very own approximation of the 206, which he proceeds to parade around in feeling mighty pleased with himself indeed.That car is the one you see before you. Not a modified Ambassador of course, but a 206 that was pulled from the production line, stripped and beaten to within an inch of its life let"s call it artistic license. It might look ready for the scrapheap, but in fact it has little over 100km on the clock and drives exactly how you"d expect a low-mileage diesel 206 to drive albeit with a few NVH issues.In a moment of pure poetry, earlier this year Peugeot actually purchased the ailing Ambassador brand, which got our cogs turning. To celebrate this acquisition, could we do what the advert"s producers didn"t dare and turn an actual Ambassador into the 206"s modern equivalent, the 208? For added excitement we then upped the ante and decided to make it a 208 GTI, allowing us to deploy a dodgy two-tone Coupe Franche paint job.
Date written: 2 Nov 2017
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 9806
You"re probably staring at this beaten up, tatty old Peugeot 206 and wondering why it"s tweaking a memory somewhere in the back of your brain. Try imagine it with a stirring Indian soundtrack. Still no? It is the star of quite possibly the greatest TV advert ever, and today we"re driving it.But first, a refresher. The advert in question, The Sculptor", filmed in Jaipur, India and released in 2003, stars a gentleman who sees a 206 ad in the paper and falls in love. But without sufficient funds to buy one, he sets about driving his Hindustan Ambassador into a wall, getting an elephant to sit on it and welding through the night to produce his very own approximation of the 206, which he proceeds to parade around in feeling mighty pleased with himself indeed.That car is the one you see before you. Not a modified Ambassador of course, but a 206 that was pulled from the production line, stripped and beaten to within an inch of its life let"s call it artistic license. It might look ready for the scrapheap, but in fact it has little over 100km on the clock and drives exactly how you"d expect a low-mileage diesel 206 to drive albeit with a few NVH issues.In a moment of pure poetry, earlier this year Peugeot actually purchased the ailing Ambassador brand, which got our cogs turning. To celebrate this acquisition, could we do what the advert"s producers didn"t dare and turn an actual Ambassador into the 206"s modern equivalent, the 208? For added excitement we then upped the ante and decided to make it a 208 GTI, allowing us to deploy a dodgy two-tone Coupe Franche paint job.
Date written: 2 Nov 2017
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 9806