Citroens are an acquired taste. For over fifty years their quirkiness and idiosyncracies have meant that only the adventurous find out how good they are. I became a Citroen man immediately upon buying my first ever Citroen, an AX 14TZS (I really wanted a GT but only two-door versions were available at the time and the family insisted).

It was the best car I ever owned. Suddenly all those Citroen oddities made sense; the single-spoke steering wheel, for instance. I had always thought of it as a gimmick but use one and you realise that now your thumbs can roam unrestricted around the wheel.

The AX turned out to be the perfect Q-car - named after the Q-ships of the First World War, merchant ships fitted with hidden guns that could blast a submarine out of the water. In the same way, the TZS looked so ordinary, without the give-away spoilers and deep splitter of the GT, but it was nearly as quick and handled just as well. Many are the boy racers who were left gasping at the lights as my little red bomb disappeared into the distance.

It weighed almost nothing, you see. The bonnet was so thin that you had to guard it to prevent it being dented by some idiot sitting on it. The rear door was hung on the rear glass, without supports and, as a result, too enthusiastic a slamming of the tailgate would result in the window smashing and the door hanging forlornly from it’s lock. All was forgiven because it was so good to drive.

They raced AXs in France and it was like a renaissance of the mini days of the sixties - hordes of little screamers fighting to be into the corner first. That surely must have been so much fun as to be worth making illegal. The end came far too soon for me.

Citroen replaced the AX with the Saxo, much closer to the Peugeot vision of normality and so much more boring too. In England, some fool drove his Jaguar out of a side street and mangled my TZS beyond repair. All good things come to an end sooner or later, I suppose.

But that little car made a Citroen man of me. I’d never have believed it thirty years ago but now, given the choice, I’d buy Citroen every time. How the mighty are fallen…

This may seem a strange choice for Auto-Exotica; the Renault Dauphine was hardly a collector’s classic or a ground-breaking innovation that changed the face of motoring forever. But it has something that no other car can lay claim to: it was the car I learned to drive in!

It was my mother’s car (my father’s at the time was a Rover 90 - a classic of sorts) and I am glad, looking back, that it was the accidental choice for my formative driving days. What made it special as a first car was that it was rear-engined. There can be no better introduction to driving than a rear-engined car, especially if you are in your teens and fancy yourself as God’s gift to the driving world.

Because rear-engined cars are fundamentally safe; they will spin like a top if you overdo a corner but, unless you’re driving a Volkswagen Beetle, there is no way you’ll ever turn one over. Beetles flip because they have swing arm rear suspension - as the car leans away from the corner, the swing arm forces the wheel under the car until eventually it can go no further and, at that point, the car turns over.

Not so the Dauphine. I learned to “hang the tail out” around corners, holding the car balanced at the exact point between spinning and turning, and occasionally I would lose it and do a fancy pirouette down the road - but never was it anywhere near flipping. As a tutor for opposite lock, it was better than a skidpan.

This particular Dauphine was unusual in one respect; it had a big letter “G” on the rocker cover. Now, knowing that the Renault tune-up specialists in France were named Gordini, I became convinced that somehow one of their engines had found its way into my mothers car. Because it was fast, much faster than it should have been and quicker than its natural competition, the Ford Anglias that abounded.

The Dauphine should have been pretty quick anyway - it was nothing but a tinny body with plastic trimmings inside and the sound of its slamming doors would echo in the empty space of its innards. So it was light and did not need a brute of an engine to get it up to speed. The extra power, real or imagined, donated by that “G” on the engine gave my mother’s car a performance that made it a joy to drive, especially as it handled so well (if you enjoyed oversteer - and what red-blooded boy racer doesn’t?).

Of course, there were all the usual foibles of French design of the time - the whippy gear lever and blatantly plastic steering wheel - but I forgave it all because it was such fun to drive. Years later, when I encountered driving on ice and snow for the first time (it does not snow in Zimbabwe), the lessons that old Dauphine taught me came in very handy.

So I don’t care that the Dauphine probably doesn’t belong amongst the illustrious company of these pages. It was my first love, after all.

I do like the oddities of the automotive world and they don’t come much odder than the cars produced by the German DKW company. For a start, they were committed to the two-stroke engine and all their cars had the familiar clatter of that engine. Not content with that, they were the first to build a three-cylinder engine and it was used in almost all of their their cars.

Why two-stroke and why three cylinders? I would have to guess that they just liked being different. But it was a very effective difference - their engines were so light that they proved very handy in competition vehicles and DKW was a big name in rallying in the 50s. There was a strong rumor at the time that DKW stood for Deutches Kleine Wunder (little German wonder), a fitting enough accolade to the car and more accurate than the real meaning: Dampf-Kraft Wagen (steam-powered vehicle).

The car I remember from the early sixties was their 1000S, a fairly normal-looking family saloon, apart from that distinctive racket from the engine, of course. The Deek was common in Africa at the time and, even today, there is a thriving fanbase in South Africa. But the multiplicity of models and variants were to prove too much for the company to support; in 1964 they were absorbed by the Volkswagen Group and they ceased production of one of the most idiosyncratic cars on the road.

Many of these strange adventures in the automotive world were to prove ahead of their time. The two-stroke engine has been killed off by clean emissions legislation but the idea of odd-numbered cylinders has been reborn and lives again in the many five-cylinder engines of today. So it is good that we should remember DKW and the German engineers who insisted on doing things differently. The Wikipedia has a very good history of the company for those who are interested.

In the mid-sixties, Enzo Ferrari was looking for a way to compete with Porsche by selling a smaller Ferrari that used existing components. There was an existing V6 engine, designed for Formula 2 and, after some persuasion from others about the ability of customers to drive mid-engined cars, Enzo allowed the Dino to be produced in 1968.

This was the Dino 206, the dream of every boy racer at the time - an affordable Ferrari that looked great and, thanks to its aluminum 2 liter engine and lightweight body, performed like a grown-up Ferrari. Many, including myself, consider its Pininfarina-design to be the best ever for a mid-engined car.

In 1969, the Dino was re-designed with a 2.4 liter V6 and was known as the 246 GT. This model continued in production until 1974 and was available as an open spyder after 1971. Not surprisingly, the car was very popular and a total of 3,761 were built.

As I have said before, I like small cars for their handling and cheekiness. In all the years since the Dino’s era I don’t think I have seen or heard of any small car with quite the desirability of the Dino. And I say that even though I am no great Ferrari fan. The darn thing is just so pretty!