This Simca Rallye Stripe Design Is Great And A Little Vampire-y: Cold Start

You know what cars we don’t talk about very often? Simcas. They tend to be one of the forgotten French marques, overshadowed by Peugeot and Citroën and Renault. But, back in the day, they made some really appealing little cars! I especially like their boxy rear-engined era, and it’s one of those I want to talk about today. Well, mostly I want to talk about a stripe kit design, because this is Cold Start and we just tend to focus on Small Things first thing in the day, so let’s look at the stripe design of the Simca 1000 Rallye 2.

You may want a bit of background; the Simca 1000 was a little rear-engined car introduced in 1961 and very clearly influenced by the styling of the Corvair.

In that aspect, it certainly wasn’t alone; so many European (and some Japanese) cars of the era had some very clear Corvair-mania, as I’ve illustrated before:

The little Simca fit into this camp quite cleanly. Interestingly, it started out as a Fiat project; Fiat was a major shareholder in Simca, so it’s not all that strange. A couple of years later, Chrysler bought out most of the shares, in case you were curious. The 1000 would become a fairly popular little car, and humans being humans, soon people wanted a faster version. So, the little 944cc engine that made about 40something horsepower got upgraded to 53 or so hp in the Rallye version, and then a Rallye 2 model came out that made an impressive 60 hp.

These were very cool little cars, and I especially like the Rallye 2 stripe design here. As you can see, it’s mostly focused at the rear (some versions came with a black hood, too) and is a sort of wraparound design, forming a sort of U-shape that covers the engine lid and wing at the rear and wraps around into some dart-like shapes at the sides, reaching from the rear of the car to the B-pillar.

It kind of feels like a black cloak with a raised collar on the car, like a traditional Dracula/Vampire kind of cloak, if that makes sense? It looks sort of comically sinister, which I like.

The blacked-out engine lid sort of unifies all of the air louvers and intakes, of which there are plenty, even though these Rallye versions moved the radiator up front.

Here’s a good walkaround of a Simca 1000 Rallye 2:

I especially love all the huge rally lights. These are such fun cars! Here’s one in action:

Also, on the Rally-prepped cars, many of them have what I believe may be the largest dash-mounted idiot light in all of automotive history:

Look at that thing! Nobody’s ignoring that! Or if you are, I’m impressed.

Anyway, it’s an interesting stripe design, and one that’s not really seen too often; boxy cars like this, especially three-box-type boxy cars, are just not encountered much anymore, and it would be tricky to adapt this sort of stripe design to another body style, but I think the general vampire-like cloak livery is one worth reconsidering!

You can drive it and say things like “I vant to oversteer bleh bleh” or some shit like that and have a pretty good time!