Vive La France! Marrs Automotive Keeps Les Voitures Citroëns Alive

• French cars are cool, Citroëns are French, therefore Citroëns are cool.

• Keeping Citroëns alive is tres difficile.

• JR Martin of Marrs Automotive can fix your Citroën and fix it right.

There has always been a certain je ne sais quoi about French cars. They have character, fashionably stylish design, and a certain joie de vivre. Look what they’re doing, making me speak French! I can’t help it. Maybe you like them, too. Maybe you have even owned a French car at one time or another. It’s even possible that you’ve forgotten that they would sometimes, inexplicably, and at the worst possible time, break.

That was the reason—one of the reasons, anyway—French cars never did so well here. It took a brave and hearty soul, preferably a brave and hearty soul with good mechanical skills, to import one, or to buy it off the showroom floor during the time from 1949 to 1975 when they were officially imported.

And of those beautiful French cars, perhaps the most Continental was Citroën. They were scary, too, like that French model you wanted to ask out but were afraid you’d be chewed up, spat out, and left destitute in some unfamiliar Metro station with your 24-hour Metro card expired.

Citroëns went up and down, remember? They raised and lowered themselves when they started and stopped, as if riding on a languorous cushion of equal parts French creative engineering and magic. It was that parlor trick, the hydro-pneumatic suspension, that still scares people away from buying them.

“What if that hydraulic thing breaks?” people cry. “I don’t know how to fix that! No one knows how to fix that!”

Au contraire mon frere, because there is a certain bon ami of les voitures Citroën in Southern California who knows exactly how to fix it.

“I’m a mechanical engineer,” said Jean-Francois (JF) Martin, owner and mechanic at Marrs Automotive in Santa Clara, California. “Yes, and then autodidact (self-taught) and then I just started liking cars. Just one day I was like, ‘That’s interesting. I’d like to know how it works.’”

He started with a moped when he was just 14 in his native France. It was a 1963 Peugeot BB 63, given to him with a seized engine. He got it running again, of course.

“And then I just learned how things were put together.”

He replaced the rings on the piston of the two-stroke, replaced the points and condenser, and then, after that, “…the rest is history.”

Next came a Peugeot 403 and on into Citroëns. He came to love Citroëns because his uncle, who is also his godfather, was a Citroëns salesman. Every time he visited, he had a different Citroëns: first the GS, then the CX, then many different models of the XM, then a DS 23 with fuel injection.

“It was blue on blue and for me, it was a spaceship—you had the turn signals, you know, off the roofline, and then it goes up and down. And it goes really fast and in turns my uncle was kind of crazy driving. That’s when you could drive fast in France. And that car really made an impression on me. It gives me goosebumps even now.”

I checked, it did.

“The design of those cars is just so unique, so beautiful. And then such a massive melting pot of really brilliant engineering.”

Then—quelle surprise!—his uncle/godfather gave him the car, the DS 23, the melting pot of brilliant engineering, his, all his.

“I was 17 and a half and I started fixing it up, and then I was 18, you have to be 18 in France to drive. When I was 18 plus one day—boom—I was down at the local DMV.”