The Beast.
The Beast is a 1973 Citroen Dyane which myself and 2 friends resurrected in 2018, and set out intending to complete the Mongol Rally. We survived up to Kazakhstan, where a bust CV joint forced us to turn back. When we returned, some serious repair and restoration work was completed- a full engine rebuild, suspension rebuild, some welding to the body tub and more.
UPDATE: we decided to take the Beast on another little trip- this time to Scotland, to take part in the Loch Ness Raid! However, the pre-long journey inspection revealed some fairly horrific cracking on the chassis, right below the bulkhead. I knew that some welding work or something was impending as the chassis has had a long and hard life, but I had hoped to put it off a little while longer! This was the week before we were due to leave, so I made a load of hurried phone calls and ordered a new galvanised chassis, boot floor, floor pans, sills, C-posts, rear inner wing bump stops, and the repair panels for the bottom of the bulkhead.
We tore into it and had the body shell stripped and off the chassis inside a day. Another couple of (long) days finished the welding and repainting, a day to fit all the mechanicals to the galvanised chassis, and a day and a half to reunite the 2 halves. Unfortunately, this little repair project took slightly longer than anticipated- so we finished at 2am, on the day after we had planned to leave! This meant that we had just one day to drive to Inverness from sunny Kent.
4 hours sleep and we hit the road, and the as yet untested Beast performed beautifully. It took us all the way to Inverness, all across the Highlands and over the Bealach Na Ba twice, then all the way home without missing a beat.
As a side note, a lot of the progress pictures look like a total dump- this is because this was such a quick job we didn’t actually have time to clear a space and get it in the workshop, we did the whole thing start to finish on the driveway!
Hopefully, this remarkable car will undertake another seriously long trip or two in the future, but at the moment, it is staying in Kent. For more pictures go to our Instagram.
