1935 Citroën Roadster

GRAHAM & MARGARET TULETT’S 1935 CITROЁN ROADSTER

For the purose of understanding what I was faced with, simply think of a floor shift being placed on the dash board.

We all have recollections of seeing a particular type of car back when we were little and that car was indelibly etched in our minds for whatever reason – often because it may have been unusual in design, or its location etc. Way back in the early 1950s, when my grandparents baby-sat me after school, I used to gravitate to a house further up their street in Mt Eden (Auckland) and sit on the low brick wall and gaze at the collection of cars on the front lawn and inside the basement garage (when the door happened to be open). The source of my fascination was the collection of (what I later knew as 1930s – 1940s) Citroëns – a coupe, a roadster and a sedan. The roadster was orange/faded red in colour, and I recall it was looking a bit decrepit even back then. My fascination with roadsters/convertibles had begun with being collected from the convent school by a young gardener in his orange (sea-chrome?) Morris 8 sports a couple of years earlier. So any orange/faded red convertible was always going to catch my attention. However it was to be 65-plus years before I was to set eyes on another live example of what I now know to be a 1935 Citroën Roadster, and that happened to be at a recent Noggin Night at Canterbury VCC, when Graham and Margaret Tulett’s Roadster was on display having taken out the 2018 Restoration of the Year trophy! AND, upon examining Graham’s photo collection of the restoration, I noted that it originally was (wait for it!) orange/red in colour. Was it the same one? As it turned out, no it wasn’t, but that’s not important for this epic restoration story, which began way back in 1970. But how uncanny was that? Seeing an almost identical Citroën convertible all those years ago, and then crossing paths once again some 65-plus years later? Needless to say I jumped at the chance to do a “Behind the Wheel” on a type of car which I had first seen so many years ago.

But, before embarking on that part of the story, let me bring you up to speed with the history of these particularly nice examples of classic 1930s roadsters, which were pretty advanced for their time in terms of design and performance.