Driving the Rarest French Cars In America

After puttering around the parking lot in a series of thin-skinned French micro-cars that made us feel like a French peasant delivering artichokes to market in 1961, we nabbed an electric scooter and drove it up and down the aisles of the Lane Motor Museum.

The museum was closed for the day, so there were no bumbling tourists or scolding docents to avoid. Instead, there was simply row after row of the most unconventional vehicles we’d ever seen, every one of them obscure and adorable. If Wes Anderson collected cars, we thought, this would be his hoard.

This was already a perfect experience, but it was simply the amuse bouche to what was possibly the greatest automotive day of our lives. (And we’ve banked some pretty amazing days, vehicularly speaking.) The Lane, at the behest of its generous proprietor Jeff Lane and his team of crack mechanics, had invited us to Tennessee to preview its latest exhibit, which celebrated the glorious insanity that is the history of French cars.

In college, our school’s art museum hosted a program that allowed students to borrow, and hang in their dorm rooms, original works of art by, say, Andy Warhol or Robert Rauchenberg, the idea being that personal exposure to art enriches one’s life. Jeff Lane feels similarly about cars. “They’re pieces of sculpture,” he tells us. “They’re meant to be enjoyed. In motion.”

To this end, Jeff gave us the opportunity to drive along one of the most ideal roadways in America—the Natchez Trace—in a half dozen of the world’s most iconic French cars: dreams and revelations to a one.

We began the day in a golden 1973 Citroën SM, the ovoid, swivel-headlamped, sharp-nosed, Maserati-powered executive grand touring missile that pretty much defines its louche decade. The car is driven with your heart, and your fingertips. Everything about it is smooth and dulcet, and weird, as if your internal soundtrack is being played on a synthesized bassoon. It is effortless and emotional all at once. We might need one.

Next came its polar opposite, a 1985 Renault R-5 Turbo, a homologated archetype of the era’s unhinged factory racers. To produce it, Renault ripped out the back seat of their front engine, front-wheel-drive econo-hatch, installed a booming turbocharged motor driving the rear wheels, and fed it through gaping intakes in flared rear fenders. The delay in the forced induction system’s spool up is so severe that it’s impossible to keep this car in its power band. But the revs between 4,500 and 6,000 rpm were glorious.