The Dauphine was of course one of the pioneering small, economic continental cars that steered the world away from two ton gas guzzlers at the end of the fifties.

It was a cute, compact issue designed inhouse by Renault with assists from carrozeria Ghia.

You can see the moddish elements of the three box design, whose Euro motifs where decidedly other than the American chrome clad giants that were being designed at the time, and with whome the Dauphine would attempt to do battle.

Check out this interesting ad for the little Frenchie from North America — its interesting to see how, as far back as fifty years ago, urban utility and fuel economy were becoming a marketing element. America might have been booming, but they also wanted to keep an early eye on the pennies.

We’re not sure how successful the car proved to be in the states, but it would have cut an alternative dash on the streets of Manhattan, as it would do today.

These little cars, with their rear mounted engine and rear ‘swing axle’ would have been a quirky little handler too — a lot more fun to chuck around than your average Buick at the time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

full set of images from Ian Wilson here.

Every September vintage and classic racers gather in the historic hillside town of Angouleme, which straddles the beautiful Charente River.

At the hub of the town is an amazing 12th century cathedral, but during the middle weekend of September all eyes are on Circuit des Remparts, which has hosted the street race here since 1939.

The weekend opens on Friday with the Concours D’elegance, where the machinery can be ogled, lusted after and judged. Racing proper begins on Saturday and Sunday — and it’s the close up and personal, visceral nature of the tight circuit that brings such good entertainment — and great pictures too.

Check out the lovely onboard action from what looks like a venerable prewar car, which is really evocative of racing times past.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, we were just going to tweet this but after having looked at this clip a few times, we’ve decided it’s worth at least a daily. In fact, we think we could devote an entire magazine the boldness and vision of where this ad is coming from.

Firstly, not only do they manage to drop a real, living breathing 205 GTi from a genuine Hercules, they then manage to get the pilot to risk his neck (and a few gazillion Francs worth of transport aircraft) by skimming the surface of the tundra.

What we love also is the vaguely amused expression on the face of the GTi jockey (making a passable impression of a low-rent James Bond, of course), as he negotiates the falling cluster bombs to make it without being too late for his date.

Remember folks, this was way, way before CGI came and changed the ad game forever. This stuff actually happened. No really. Well the fighters (are they Mirages?) may have been stock footage, but you catch our drift.

And that was a particularly good car. We want to buy one. Now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s a subtly and sophistication in the great, grand design of the DS that makes so many contemporary attempts at stylish automotive pennery look sophmoreish in the extreme.

When thinking about the goddess, though, we can’t help musing about what a brilliant addition to anyone’s life an estate version would be.

Apparently the stretched version of the DS was known as either the ‘Safari’, ‘La Familiale’ or plain old ‘Wagon’.

But whatever you named it, there was a grandeur to the vision of the DS that had everyone from the man in the street to high falutin’ philosophers like Roland Barthes frothing at the mouth.

We can see what all the fuss was about.

So much was changed by the vision of the designer of these amazing cars — and to this day they can turn heads and take the breathe away.

We’ve noted elsewhere how we missed out on the automotive opportunity of a lifetime when we neglected to purchase a neglected Alpine 310 from a local country lane.

The burn of the memory of a missed opportunity is especially piquant when you stumble across pictures like this: possibly the nicest example we’ve ever seen.

We’re falling in love all over again.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Not sure, but it’s a fair bet that not many of you out there would have come across this stunningly original, intriguingly existential film from the brilliant imagination of Claude Lelouch.

Lelouch, you may remember is the director of another of our favourites, the piece of onboard cinematic art that is Rendezvous.

This is a love story, but shot through with the sort of images and sequences that puts it firmly into the category of car cult classic.

The sequence below is the only piece of film that we can think of that deals with the internal dialogue the lone driver strikes up on a long over night roadtrip.

We love the way that Lelouch deals with the experiential reality of driving – including all the emotional entanglements of which our cars are inevitably part.

Look for Claude Lelouch’s films and more at Spirit Level

Click here to view the embedded video.

Feel my pain. For around three years now, I’ve been driving past a Renault Alpine 310, a later V6 GT model at that, rotting (or whatever it is that is the equivalent of rotting for fibreglass) on the wrong side of a skip, just off a country lane that I pass almost every day.

Now I am one of the legions out there who would truly, madly, deeply love to own and drive a modern classic like this — but for whom the practicalities of family life rule out the purchase of temperamental French two seaters made from fibreglass.

The design of the later versions from the great Robert Opron, who was responsible for the latter restylings of the DS, as well as Citroen’s sexiest creations the SM, CX and GS — and went on to pen the marmite-ish Fuego, too. You can see that rakish, front-heavy attitude in the 310 — signature of a very Gallic futurism that you don’t see very much these days…

I’d been meaning for at least twelve of these last thirty six months, to pluck up the courage to walk up to the doorway of the property where the Alpine is parked and make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

This morning, being on the brink of making the leap and striding manfully to make an epoch making decision in my motoring life, the Alpine had disappeared — gone, I can only presume, to some lucky individual able to dedicate the time and commitment to bringing this beauty back to life.

And what a life it would be. These latter models, with a 2.9 litre V6 engine that made around 200 BHP, must have been a blast. Not ever having driven one we can only wonder at the handling, but with a hefty steel tube chassis and clothed in strong but lightweight fibreglass they must have flown.

But more than the potential performance of these things it was the unique styling that attracted me – and no doubt the striking resemblance they had (in my mind at least) to Captain Scarlet’s patrol vehicle.

Image: Robert Roux

We’re suckers here for two things; 1) brutal racing cars of the 1970s and 2) cutaway drawings of brutal racing cars of the 1970s.

When these things come together we are bowled over.

So, for your delight, behold this lovely period cutaway and an equally pleasing video of Matra’s bruiser from 1970, the V12 engined M650.

French company Matra was originally an aerospace firm which specialised in advanced missile systems. But someone in the organisation obviously loved the idea that ballistics could be transposed into tarmac-bound propulsion.

Matra produced some interesting road cars over the years, particularly the sporty, chic Bagheera and the Rancho — a forward looking SUV before its time.

But the company’s racing arm deserves to be remembered most fondly. They produced interesting projects toward the end of the 1960s throughout the seventies and into the eighties, including fruitful collaborations with Ford and Ligier.

In the video below you can see (and hear) the brilliance of the V12 engined 650, developments of which led to a trio of outright victories at Le Mans between 1972–1974.

The fact that this uncompromising machine was able to break the dominance of Porsche during this classic era is testament to its right to be dragged from relative obscurity.

Try to ignore the loungecore  soundtrack and skip to 1.15 when the true symphony begins…

Click here to view the embedded video.

On the day that the world finally gets to read journalists’ first hand accounts of what the new British supercar is actually like to drive (see Influx writer Ben Oliver’s splendid account of hanging with the MP4 12C and Jenson Button here) we thought we’d focus on an incredible piece of Franco-Latin artistic imagineering , rather than the genius piece of passionate engineering released today from the boys at Woking. Call us contrary, but there you go.

Gabriel Orozco is a sculptor who’s a bit on the whacky side. He likes to take everyday objects – cat-food tins, yoghurt lids etc – and alter them, ever so slightly, to reveal something different about them: to find a way of seeing.

Take his Citroën DS that he sliced into thirds and removed the centre to exaggerate the little Sixties motor’s stream lining. Why? Because as a child the artist – seduced by racing and fast cars – imagined that any car could be faster if only it were a little thinner.

In the way of all artists this piece is shrouded in layer upon layer of context. DS is pronounced déesse, meaning goddess in French. The result is a sculpture that is at once clunky and sleek, in limbo somewhere between Noddy’s ride and a lightening quick aerodynamic Formula 1 car.

Curious? Pop along to London’s Tate Modern to witness the beautifully spliced freak before April 25.

Quintessential French filmmaker? Perhaps. Unbearably pretentious? Depends. Petrolhead? At times.The controversial French director Jean Luc Godard’s work is shot through with ambiguities. One of the most visible is the precarious relationship that exists in his films with cars and with women. They represent desire and danger as readily as liberation and entrapment – in Godard’s films these things collide in the form of the subtly feminine curves of the corrozzeria.

In 1960’s New Wave opus Breathless, the director’s faith in automobiles is almost intact. The whole movie is steeped selfconsciously in the essence of Hollywood, from the sleek cars to the cool gangsterism of the central character, which is played by an impossibly hip Jean Paul Belmondo.  Jean Seberg, meanwhile, plays Belmondo’s American lover. Gangster and girl cruise around Paris in various stolen motors, including a beautiful ’56 Thunderbird coupe, committing crimes and indulging in an elliptical sort of trans-Atlantic holiday romance.

But Belmondo’s true partner-in-crime is not the girl.  It’s the car. The cipher of freedom wrought in steel is always waiting around that Parisian street corner to help him escape. In the closing scene Belmondo is caught out. Having been betrayed by his girl, the getaway car is nowhere to be seen. Breathless, with the police in pursuit, the young man’s luck runs out and he takes a bullet in his back. The moral of the story? Women can’t be trusted, and the American dream will fail you.

From thereon in, Godard’s work the relationship between man and machine becomes steadily more and more sour. Cars continually fail their owners. Swanky film producers and their lovers are abruptly crushed in their shiny Alfas.  With the arrival of Weekend, Godard’s 1967 dystopian vision of the future, the decree absolute between the director and the automobile is finally exchanged.

The film features what was the longest one-take tracking sequence in film history -  the camera panning across a hilariously strange, seemingly endless traffic jam. Fights break out in the background. Families picnic in their cars. Death is discovered in tableau at the roadside.  The car is no longer a handy escape mechanism from the strictures of mainstream society, but instead becomes the driving force of a bourgeois decadence that spawns only death and decay.

Jean Luc Godard evoked the contemporary dilemma of car culture very early. We can’t make a break from our planet-gobbling obsession with cars. They may fail us every now and then — but being totemic of freedom, escape and sexuality — they remain essentially seductive.