Citroën AX Sport
Why 7.1: Citroën's first hot AX, and the only one with carburettors: a 1,294 cc four with twin Solex chokes making 95 PS, in a three-door shell so light that Citroën advertised the base car's 640 kg as a feature. The white 5.5-inch steel wheels were not a cost saving — they were the specification.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
Twin Solex chokes gulping air two feet from the windscreen in a 722 kg shell with essentially no sound deadening — the induction is the loudest thing in the car and it hardens properly past 5,000 rpm. But it is a 1.3 on a factory silencer, thin at the bottom and thrashy at the top. You hear the carburettors, not the exhaust.
4-cylinder · naturally aspirated · 6,800 rpm redline · rated 6.0 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €10k (1987) → €13k (2026), trending up · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
Built before ISOFIX existed, so there are no anchor points at all. A child seat here is a seatbelt installation, and the belt geometry of the period was not designed with one in mind.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
The AX's whole engineering premise was mass. Citroën used plastic for every panel that did not carry a load and varied the steel thickness everywhere else, and got a five-door family car down to 640 kg — a figure modern superminis miss by half a tonne. The Sport arrived in 1987 as the first attempt to do something with that, and Citroën's approach was almost aggressively low-tech: bore the 1.1 out to 1,294 cc, fit twin Solex carburettors (Weber from late 1988), find 95 PS, stiffen the suspension, and leave everything else alone. The result weighs about 722 kg, has no power steering, no anti-lock brakes and no assistance of any kind, and gets to 100 km/h in a little over eight seconds — which in 1987 put it on terms with cars costing twice as much and, more to the point, made it lethally quick across a French D-road. The AX GT and the injected GTi that followed were softer and better mannered; the Sport is the one with the carburettor induction noise and the reputation. It was built for barely two years and, like almost all cheap fast hatchbacks of the era, it was used until it broke and then scrapped. What is left in France is now genuinely scarce and has started to appreciate for the first time, which is the only thing pulling the score down. Citroën has never sold a car of any kind in the United States since 1974.