1972 AND ‘73 CITROËN MASERATI SM
(ABOVE) The odd Green SM, a ‘73 automatic, in my garage in Harbor Ridge, Newport Beach, 1997. The Silver Shadow in the back is in its intermediate color scheme of Silver Metallic with Aqua Metallic panels. Anonymous bonnet mascot in Business Casual sits on the R-R.
(ABOVE) Pearl White SM #2. This ‘72 SM was originally Garish Gold with a brown leather interior (see text). was Gold with a brown interior. My then-wife drove the Odd Green one in the top photo for ten miles with a split oil hose and threw a connecting rod. So I had the Gold SM resprayed Pearl Ivory and installed the white interior from the Odd Green car into it. V6 and 5 speed.
Back in 1998, my workshop was located in the hotbed of SoCal car madness—in West Costa Mesa, literally right on the border of Costa Mesa and Newport Beach. Anyone who has hears of Newport Beach, but is unaware of its West side, visualizes mansions, palm trees, surf and sand, and pricey restaurants along Pacific Coast Highway.
Well, that’s the media version of Newport Beach. Its West Side (West of Placentia Ave, where the TV cameras seldom go) is automotive central for anyone in the OC who is building a car, or maintaining a car that’s in the least bit old, or unusual. On the streets West of Placentia can be found a wide variety of suppliers of all sorts of parts and services for antique and exotic vehicles. Several of my articles take place in that workshop and in that tiny (less than ½ square mile) geographic locus.
This case in point: a pair of early 1970s Citrõen SMs, bought at bargain prices from an ex-Citröen dealer who lost his lease and was clearing out his warehouse, which was located in the West of Placentia Zone. I scored them—both complete, but only one running—for less than $3K each. I towed one to my shop using the other as a tow vehicle.
Back up a bit here. How many reading this even know what an SM is? It was an early exotic, that in its brief five-year presence on the automotive scene, was more advanced than any Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Maserati of a similar vintage. The SM was a semi-bastard child of a Citroen body and a modified Maserati engine. However, that’s about 15% of the story, because Citroen decided to turn this exotic sport coupe into the most mechanically-advanced vehicle of its day.
Let me detail the features of this car that, combined, gave the owner the most unique driving experience on record for its era. Like most Citroens, it had the “champignon” (“mushroom”) brake pedal—a 4” diameter rubber mushroom cap that perched virtually flat on the floor, acted directly on the master cylinder, and because if this required only 1/4”-1/2” of motion to activate the very powerful four-wheel disc brakes. This took some getting used to, but once the not-too-steep learning curve was mastered, the performance was superior to anything else on the road, save its sister cars, the ID and DS sedans, which shared the rubber-capped champignon (“mushroom” from its shape) button.
(ABOVE) The instrument panel, one spoke steering wheel, and leather-upholstered seats of an SM coupé. This is a five-speed car. SMs were also available with 3-speed automatic transmissions.
The steering wheel had one spoke (again, like the sedans) but it controlled a hydraulic steering system which was variable ratio. At slow speeds, the steering was very fast (a bit over one turn lock-to-lock!), which made parking and tight maneuvering a breeze. As you approached freeway speeds, however, resistance in the system and a spread-out ratio of 3 turns lock-to-lock made the car very stable and confidence-inspiring. The driver could park his SM, leave it running, and turn the steering wheel full-lock in either direction, and let go of the wheel, and the car would spin the wheel back until the steering was once again centered. Huge tires, considering the compact size of the car, contributed to its “planted on the road” feel at speed. My SMs were the only cars out of the 42 cars that I’ve owned since 1968, that could be driven at 100 MPH in a heavy rain with full confidence and little perceived difference from the same pace on a dry road. They were, in a word, amazing.
Anyone familiar with Citroëns will, of course, know of the total hydraulic system of the car, which controlled brakes, steering, and suspension. I won’t go into great detail here, but suffice to say that the entire car was piped with high-pressure hydraulic lines which were pressurized whenever the engine was running. These lines carried hydraulic fluid to the brake master cylinder, steering rack, and suspension components on all four wheels. There were no springs or shock absorbers as found on other cars, but rather 6” diameter bright green steel spheres—one per wheel—which housed a rubber diaphragm separating a hemisphere of air from a hemisphere of.hydraulic fluid. Varying the pressure of the fluid controlled the ride height, and the travel of each wheel acted on the air in each sphere to compress the fluid with the rubber diaphragm as the interface. This gave an incomparable ride over road irregularities.
Additionally, the ride height could be varied through four distinct settings from about 4” of ground clearance for high-speed smooth road running, up to 10” for a certain degree of off-road tripping, should the owner decide to go cow-tipping.
(ABOVE) The puzzling and complex engine compartment of an SM. The suspension, braking, and steering are all hydraulically-powered. The SM has the most powerful brakes of any production vehicle of its day. Steering is variable-ratio and variable-assist.
The SM was available in either 5-speed manual or 3-speed automatic configuration (I had one of each), linked to a front-wheel-drive system. Its engine was the tried-and-true 4.2 litre DOIHC Maserati V8, but with the two rear cylinders lopped off to give a 2.8 litre V6 of uneven firing order. The engine was flipped front-to-back, so that the water pump was in the rear of the engine compartment, near the firewall, and the clutch was in the front, right behind the radiator. In front of the engine, at camshaft height, was an exposed jackshaft that ran forward to activate the hydraulic pressure pump. The Jackshaft was linked to the camshaft drive assembly via a flexible rubber coupling. There were a pair of long cloth-jacketed rubber hoses of 19mm diameter to connect the engine to the oil cooler. The SM had two horns: one rather discreet one for city use, and a very authoritative one for country and freeway use. Not being typical in any way, the horn was activated by a steering wheel stalk. The headlights would swivel to light the way around corners, a very useful feature while picking one’s way through the hills and narrow, serpentine roads that were a feature of the Southern California hills and canyons.
An owner or mechanic accustomed to the standard layout of most front-engined cars would, when confronted with the mechanicals revealed when the SM’s bonnet was opened, express confusion, amazement, humor, or most often a combination of these three emotions. There can be seen a motor (flipped front-to-back), carburetors, fan belt, alternator, and a lot of hoses and pipes. But the green-painted hydraulic spheres (for there are an additional two mounted up front to pressurize the brakes and steering), exposed jackshaft, and other odd components that are peculiar to the SM, lead to confusion as an initial impression. It seems to be a plumber’s nightmare, but makes perfect sense once a bit of time is taken to analyze the origins and insertions of each pipe and hose. The engine compartment also carries a one-litre can of special Citroen hydraulic fluid for topping-up the system, as this fluid is special to the SM.
Start the engine, allow it to idle, and open the bonnet. You will be greeted by the usual engine sounds, but the hydraulic system has a song of its own--a combination of the whirring of the jackshaft and pressure pump, and a series of clicks of two or three frequencies that are the opening and closing of the system’s proportioning valves. It’s hypnotic to Citröen owners…
A semi-relevant sidebar here: Melania Trump’s father was “into” exotic cars, and owned an SM. Capt. Jeffrey McDonald, an Army physician stationed in North Carolina, is currently in prison for life for murdering his wife and two daughters back in 1970.released in the mid-1970s due to a mistrial, owned an SM while living in Huntington Harbour in the early 1970s. He was an emergency room physician at Long Beach Hospital at the time, and I could sometimes see him speeding North along Pacific Coast Highway between home and work, as he lived in Huntington Harbour, also my home, at the time when was freed between trials.
Infamous. Other SM owners include Leonid Brezhnev, Tommy Chong, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, Ray Davies, Graham Greene, Adam Clayton, Halle Selassie, and Idi Amin (who owned seven SMs!). I “only” had two, but what an experience…my daily driver SM was Pearl White with a white pigskin interior. When I attended the annual Italian/French car show at Woodley Park in Van Nuys, CA, I found my own SM parked in the grass next to a triple-black SM owned by Jay Leno. Although my white SM had been repainted and reupholstered, Jay’s had been fully restored by Jerry Hathaway of SM World in Newhall, California. Jerry and his wife Sylvia are the SM experts in the USA, and are great people to deal with. Sylvia is one of a very few female members of Bonneville’s “200 MPH Club”.
We got to talking, and Leno told me that one of his first jobs was driving newly-landed SMs from the Port of Baltimore to the East Coast Citroen distributor for dealer preparation. Jay and I are of the same generation, and our time in high school coincides with the most exciting time in the automotive industry, just prior to the safety and emissions legislation that refocused the manufacturers’ energies from style and fashion to safety and emissions. As it turned out, they were much better at style and fashion. Both Jay and I noted that we lusted after the SM after reading Road & Track’s road test, and each of us promised ourselves that one day we would own one…and decades later, we both were able to fulfill our fantasies.
No feature in any of my cars could match the elation that I felt when I turned the key and started the SM up. It did have a default “normal” ride height, but after being parked for several hours, it would settle down into its lowest suspension setting, from which it would awaken, rouse itself, and raise up to the default height. I applied (and received!) the personalized California license tag of “LAZARUS”, because it rose from the “dead” every morning! The ride height could be adjusted “on the fly” at any speed, using a gated lever set into the floor at the left of the driver’s seat. I would occasionally pull up at a traffic light next to a Southern California low rider, and play with the lever. The reaction of the lowrider occupants was invariably laughter and thumbs up. I should note that in the seven years that I drove my SM in car-crazy Southern California, I never encountered another, save for that annual Woodley Park get-together.
When I first acquired the ’72 5-speed SM, it was dead stock, finished in a gaudy factory bright gold which had oxidized on the roof and bonnet to a rust-brown shade, despite the car’s meager 35,000 miles. I had the body refinished in Pearl Ivory, which looked fabulous.
The Gold SM’s interior had baked in the sun until the leather, though unworn and undamaged, had turned very stiff. Why the French would sew a luxury car interior using cotton thread (!), I’ll never know, but every sewn seam in the seats had split and let go, so all the individual seat panels were lying flat, in place, ready to re-sew into their original configuration. I had it reupholstered instead, in very soft Pearl Ivory pigskin.
All of the exterior “chrome” was, in fact, stainless steel, so I removed and buffed bumpers and window trim.
When the cosmetics were completed, the car was an Alice In Wonderland fantasy come to life, and turned heads wherever I drove it…
…until it hit roughly 100 miles, at which point one bank of three cylinders would cut out and I would have to limp home and ponder the cause of this fault. A phone call to SM World and Jerry Hathaway brought a possible solution, which had to do with a badly-matched ignition capacitor. I ordered new points (encased in a plastic cartridge and pre-gapped for ease of installation). These, however, though easy to install, were a bit hard on the wallet, listing at a tad over $400.00 a set! The new points duly arrived a couple of days after I ordered them, and slipped into place without any hassle.
I happily drove my renewed SM, for about a hundred miles, at which point half of the cylinders went dead and I once again was forced to limp home. A close inspection revealed badly-burned points on one cartridge, probably due to a capacitor mismatch (yes, again). Despite testing and a number of conversations with Jerry Hathaway, SM guru, I never did figure out the reason for the points failing, so I “re-engineered” the distributor instead.
Let me pause here and do a bit of explaining with regard to the SM’s distributor. I’ll begin with the engine. You will recall that it was a truncated Maserati V8; the two rear cylinders were cut off to make a 90 degree V6; not an ideal configuration in terms of firing order and Noise/Vibration, but Citroen’s engineers made it work by keeping the firing order, but out of necessity letting it fire in uneven pulses. This was the easier solution rather than retooling the entire valve gear and ignition system. However, it presented a unique situation in terms of the ignition terminal spacing on the distributor cap. Which meant that the point cartridges (which comprised a black plastic housing roughly the size and shape of one of my pipe tobacco tins, into which were stuffed the actual points and their adjusting screws, and their matching condenser.) There were two of these, which stacked on top of one another, each responsible for three of the six cylinders. These were activated in the usual manner, by cams on the distributor drive shaft. The cams were ground with the lobes staggered, which gave the rough timing and firing order.
I ordered a second set of points, and one hundred miles later I found myself limping home, $800+ poorer. As you can imagine, I was a bit frustrated, but determined to solve the issue. Jerry was as puzzled as I was, too.
SO, I CHEATED. I had a set of Mercury Capri V6 points as spares for the Sunbeam’s Capri motor. I machined out the alloy SM distributor housing and built a new plate on which the Capri points were located. The height of this plate was set so that the rubbing block for the new points straddled both cams on the distributor shaft. The only issue seemed to be that the Mercury’s distributor rotated clockwise, and the Citröen’s anti-clockwise. This turned out to be a non-issue. I set the gap, reassembled the distributor, held my breath, and turned the key. The engine started right up. I drove it, at first gingerly, and then began to wind it up right to the redline. It ran perfectly, and from the outside at least, looked stock and untouched.
Over 30,000 miles later, when I sold the car, it still had the same set of points and ran perfectly. I forgot to tell the new owner about the modifications, though. The car went through at least three owners between then and now, and the last time I saw it was in a photograph of another car in an underground parking lot in Palm Springs, so I know it’s still alive. Then it turned up for sale—for $65,000.
Out of the 42 cars I’ve owned since 1968 when I started driving, there are roughly a half dozen that I’m sorry to have parted company with.
The white SM is at the top of this list!