In the Wednesday Want section we do love a car that has been completely overshadowed by a more famous sibling, and the Peugeot 309 GTI might be the very tip of cars of this type.
Suggested right at the very formation of the Suggestions Forum by Protozua, the Peugeot 309 GTI-16 might be one of the forgotten performance cars of the 1980s.
For many, Peugeot is synonymous with the 205. The little hatchback stole all the headlines on the road in GTI form and then on the rally stages, when the Group B 205 T16 won the 1985 and 1986 World Rally Championship constructor and driver titles.
The 309 has no rally heritage and, furthermore, was a little awkward as a road car. At the time, Peugeot’s line-up consisted exclusively of models badged with -04 or -05 names, from the small 104 and 205, to the larger 305 and 405, right up to the executive 604 and its replacement the 605. The 309 was out of that sequence because it wasn’t intended to even be a Peugeot in the first place — it ought to have been produced as a Talbot, replacing the Talbot Horizon, but at the last minute Peugeot decided to abandon the Talbot brand altogether. As the 305 was larger and still being made, Peugeot opted to give the 309 an out of sequence number so that it wasn’t perceived as a successor vehicle.
Underneath, the 309 is precious little different from the 205. Aside from the extra weight — there’s around 135 lb more, though both cars are well under a ton — mainly sitting over the rear axle, there’s nothing to choose between the two. Indeed the 309’s bodystyle brings some advantages, with the increased rear weight tempering some of the famous lift-off oversteer that ended the lives of so many 205s in the 1980s. The longer tail made the 309 a little more stable at speed and in fact increased the top speed by around 5 mph.
The two cars used the same engines for the most part, with the 309 GTI being identical under the hood to the 205 1.9 GTI, but when the 309 was facelifted in 1989 there was, for left-hand drive markets, an improved powerplant on offer. The 309 GTI-16 used the 16 valve version of the 1.9 litre XU9 Peugeot engine that you’d find in the Peugeot 405 Mi-16 and Citroen BX GTI, good for 158 hp. This bumped the top speed up to nearly 135 mph and brought the 0-60mph time down to well under 8 seconds — hot hatch performance even today.
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