In response to yet another Top Gear controversy...

ALL anyone wants to know at the moment is what I think about Top Gear.

It’s been brought up by people tapping my shoulder at the bar and my mobile’s been beeping away incessantly with Facebook and Twitter chatter on the matter. Rightly so, people want to know what The Champion’s motoring correspondent makes of one of the most controversial moments of the biggest motoring show the world has ever seen.

Yep, you’ve sussed it. Why does Mr Simister drive a Peugeot?

You might have seen the clip in question. A couple of weeks ago, Jeremy Clarkson and James May took a sideswipe at the Peugeot-driving masses, and – via several crashes in a garden centre car park – insisted they should be given a wide berth on Britain’s roads. As a result, quite a few of my fellow petrolheads have poked merciless fun at me because I’ve got one.

Regular readers will probably know the Pug in question – it’s a bottom-of-the-range diesel 306, which I picked up back in November as a workhorse to entrust all the mucky motorway jobs with. I bought it primarily because it cost less than what some of my mates spend on shirts, but there’s another thing I’ve come to really love about it. It’s something applicable to all old Peugeots, and you have to go somewhere really remote to appreciate it.

Aberdeen, for instance. I was up there the other day in a borrowed Astra, and connecting the airport and the final destination of a business trip were some utterly astonishing roads. Quiet, twisty roads that threaded their way for mile after beautiful mile over the desolate Scottish moors, and yet the brand new Vauxhall felt a bit underwhelming tackling them. It was safe, comfortable and thoroughly competent, but the hint of dynamic sparkle I crave on all the cars I love was nowhere to be seen. It was the sort of disappointment that’d make some people want to punch a colleague in the face out of sheer frustration.

Yet my 15-year-old Peugeot, I discovered on not entirely dissimilar roads in Yorkshire the following day, has that sparkle in spades. Look back at motoring mags from its day and you’ll see road testers raving about the 306 GTi-6, but peel away the hot hatch garnishings and you’ll find all 306s, even bottom-of-the-range diesel ones, ride and handle beautifully. The steering talks to you. You get the sort of mid-corner updates most modern day hatchbacks would you rather you didn’t have. It’s something all old Peugeots, from the 205 GTi to the 406 estate, revel in.

Jeremy and James made that exact point eloquently before moving on to the comedy car crashes, but the message which seems to have been picked up by the wider populace is that all Peugeots are terrible to drive and commandeered by people who have a predilection for light crashes.

Old Peugeots can still deliver a real punch. Which, for reasons I’m still not sure of, seems weirdly topical.

Spare a thought for the nation's breakdown recovery crews this Christmas

THE BIGGEST hazard of driving home for Christmas – at least according to Chris Rea’s 1988 hit – is being top to toe in tailbacks. Yet if it wasn’t for a trusty AA man the other day, I wouldn’t have even made it that far.

It’s typical Simister luck. After months of managing to avoid a visit from the breakdown fairy, she would have to strike on the Friday before Christmas, just as I was preparing to pack the boot with freshly-wrapped presents and head home for the festive season.

Naturally, being the sort of chap who’d rather run a42-year-old car built by British Leyland and a 15-year-old French hatchback acquired for less than most of my mates would pay for a decent shirt, I’m used to the occasional thing going wrong. It’s just not the sort of thing you want to happen on the day you’re driving home for Christmas!

In this case, the Peugeot 306 I’d bought a few weeks earlier decided it only wanted to use three of its wheels for the long trip north – the offside rear wheel had completely seized up, and nothing I did was freeing the brakes off. Defeated, I dialled the fourth emergency service – and resigned myself to being in for a long wait.

In all my time peddling automotive tat in lieu of a shiny new car, I’ve had a distinctly mixed experience of all of Britain’s big breakdown recovery firms, including one instance when it took a staggering ten hours to recover my oldMini from Carlisle. So – on the day when most of the nation’s motorists were bound to be having the same festive intentions I was – I was hardly expecting miracles.

Yet within half an hour the stricken 306 had been jacked up and a chap in a hi-vis jacket had given me a diagnosis – the rear brake cylinder had given up the ghost and needed replacing before it was going to be safe for any pre-Christmas cruises up the A1. All of which meant finding a garage who’d be prepared to do the job inside of a day.

My usual menders of choice were too busy mending an equally problem-prone old hack – my colleague’s Saab 9000, no less – but Mr Hi-Vis had a mate at another place, and after a quick phone call and a bit of arm-twisting said garage agreed to getting the job done the same day. Sure enough, a couple of hours later I was reunited with a Peugeot ready for the important job of running the Simister family’s Christmas presents home. While I’ve had some distinctly ropey breakdown recovery jobs in the past, this time my knight in hi-vis armour genuinely was the difference between getting home and being stranded at the office, 200 miles away.

So spare a thought for the chaps in their brightly-coloured vans as they chug across the North West this Christmas. Every driver they get back on the move over the festive break is another Christmas that hasn’t been ruined by the breakdown fairy.

Here’s to them – and Merry Christmas to you too, obviously!

Introducing... the Peugeot 306

A SWISS Army knife might have dozens of different gizmos attached to it, but none of them are ever quite as good as a individual tool dedicated to doing that one job alone. For much the same reason, I've always believed in having a couple of different cars than entrusting it to a single set of wheels.

How many motors you have to hand depends on a couple of things - largely the size of your wallet and where you keep them when they're not racking up the miles - but for me, three has always been the right balance. The Life On Cars petrolhead mix has always involved having a classic to take to shows, a hairpin hooligan to enjoy on mountain passes on sunny afternoons, and a workhorse for all the less glamorous - but hugely important - mundane tasks.

For years, I've entrusted the first of those two tasks to the trusty MGB and the fun stuff to two Mazda MX-5s, but I haven't been as lucky at finding something that does the unremarkable remarkably. Four years ago, I bought a Renault 5 for just £100, which for eleven months went everywhere from Dumfries to Stonehenge without so much a whimper of complaint, but ended up getting scrapped when the MoT tester discovered the terminal rot around its D-pillars. Its hastily drafted-in replacement, a Rover 214SEi, spent three years conveying Simister junk to tips across Merseyside, but its increasingly sickly-sounding gearbox eventually drove me to sell it last year for half the £300 I paid for it.

I thought it'd be third time with its replacement - a grand's worth of top-spec Ford Mondeo, which behaved impeccably despite helping me develop an unhealthy obsession with its fuel economy. It was the perfect workhorse to compliment the MGB's nostalgia and the MX-5's love of al fresco adventures - or rather, it would have been had a chap decided not to drive his BMW into the back of it. As a result, I've spent almost all of 2014 relying entirely on two-seater sports cars for just about everything.

That's where this S-reg Peugeot 306 comes in. It is - as eagle-eyed readers might have already spotted - exactly the same 1.9 Diesel which I helped my partner's family buy earlier this year, but having just helped them buy a much newer Ford Fiesta they've been more happy to give me the venerable old Pug for a fraction of the price.

It's done 161,000 miles in 15 years, which might sound like a lot but it's got plenty of history to prove it's been cared for throughout its life. It's also got an absolute gem of an engine counting in its favour - PSA's legendary XUD diesel engine, known for their ability to go on forever providing they've been looked after. Naturally, it's not going to win any concours events any time soon and - being a diesel of the old school - it's a bit agricultural on cold mornings, but it's a small price to pay for a 50mpg family hatchback which costs less than some of my pals spend on a night out.

Is it £150 well spent or an expensive repair waiting to happen? I'd like to think it's the former, but that's one of the fun things with buying and running cars for next to nothing. Either way, it means I can go back to the Classic Car Weekly offices in it and have the option of bringing my mountain bike back in it next time.

Try doing that in an MGB GT!