These men like to tinker with their Citroën Traction Avant but also drive it to Morocco

Traction Avant Nederland, as the classic car association is officially registered, is the second largest Citroën club in the Netherlands with more than 850 members. In 1964, a few enthusiastic students from Leiden University founded the Société de Citroën, with the main aim of securing the supply of parts and, above all, keeping the then fairly dated Tractions running.

In the year of its sixtieth anniversary, Traction Avant Nederland has grown into a professional organization that organizes several rides and events every year at home and abroad. “About the same time, a Traction key club was also founded in Amsterdam,” says chairman Marc Vos. “The clubs soon found each other and the Francophile group became a national association. The ever-growing following made it possible to offer members better service. With a well-equipped parts warehouse, favorable insurance conditions, a well-organized club magazine and a streamlined exchange of experiences during club meetings and key afternoons, such as this one here in Terschuur, Gelderland. In addition to the parts supply, the five regional warehouses also manage special tools for the Traction. Members can borrow this against a deposit.”

The dusty Citroën Traction Avant survived the trip to Moscow.

Globetrotters

By analogy with the originally French Doctors Without Borders, there is a travel organization in France that operates under the name Traction Sans Frontières and offers exotic Traction trips in the furthest conceivable country. In the Netherlands, such a travel agency would have been heading for bankruptcy for a long time, because the members of the Dutch Traction subsidiary organize long-distance trips themselves. For example, Hans and Hanneke Rietveld, as spry seventies, still travel throughout Europe from their hometown of Apeldoorn with their 11BN from 1955. “The most memorable trip we ever undertook was the Paris-Moscow-Paris rally in 1984,” says the 70 year old owner. “That would be quite an adventure with a contemporary family car, but even more so with a car that was thirty years old at the time. Everyone thought we were crazy, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Apart from some minor defects, this monster journey of more than eight thousand kilometers went almost without any problems. In that respect, I have never really had to worry in all the years that I have been traveling through Europe with Hanneke. That says something about the timeless reliability of a Traction Avant.”

Several members were already in Morocco with their Citroën Traction Avant.

Another classic globetrotter turns out to be Michel Tersluysen from Slijk-Ewijk. He still considers his 11BN from 1955 to be an ideal travel car, where, according to him, the fun starts at the front door. “I already had a Citroën 2CV, but the much more spacious Traction was added purely for that purpose. My wife is from Barcelona, ​​so we regularly go there with the whole family to visit relatives. I did use a four-speed gearbox, so you can easily maintain 120 km/h on the highway without the engine starting to screech at high revs. From Barcelona there is now a boat connection with Central Morocco, which means you can easily cut off a thousand kilometers. So we did that too. We have now been on holiday in Morocco several times with our three children and the Traction. I can tell you: then you will truly experience a wonderful journey through time. Mountain roads in the High Atlas no longer hold any secrets for us.”

Homeless Vietnamese

If only because of the striking burgundy color scheme, the 1951 convertible version of Tom de Haan from Arnhem is the most striking appearance in the farm’s key shed. Through an acquaintance, the rare model was traced in Vietnam – still ‘Indochina’ under French rule – and then brought to the Netherlands. “In 1997, Mitsubishi Motors existed for eighty years and that was celebrated with eighty free Mitsubishi Carisma. To have a chance to win one of the eighty prizes, all you had to do was cut a publicity poster of the promotional model from all national and regional newspapers of Wednesday, June 11, 1997 and hang it in your window. You can imagine that when a car worth 36,000 guilders (more than €16,000) is given away in the Netherlands, everyone will hang such a poster in their window. A huge success, because the whole of the Netherlands saw red from the Carisma posters. Even though there was nothing hanging at my window, I still had the feeling that I had won the main prize when the truck with the Vietnamese Traction was delivered,” Tom laughs broadly.

When asked whether he will sooner or later run into problems with his rather rare version – due to the availability of spare parts – he answers confidently: “In the very long term that may happen at some point, but by then 3D will offer -printing is already an adequate alternative. The supply of parts in the club warehouse is still set in stone for the coming decades. Moreover, you should not forget that there are still more than a thousand Citroën Traction Avants driving around in the Netherlands. There is currently no shortage of donor cars and if it concerns a finicky part that is not immediately available, you can of course always contact foreign clubs.”

Meccano set

The club organizes only one technical information day every year. Today’s key assignment is for the club members present to install a four-cylinder engine that must be fully ready to drive by the end of the afternoon. Then it turns out that most Traction owners are certainly not yet ready for their test piece when it comes to key work. In fact, over time you even get the impression that they could have done the job blindfolded. They put the Parisian Meccano set together like a well-oiled machine. It seems like an exercise in maintaining agility rather than anything to learn.

Ary Langbroek, the owner of the Groot Hazebroek farm in Terschuur, where this year’s key course is taking place for the people of the Citroën Traction Avant club.

“André Lefèbvre’s technical chef-d’oeuvre, masterfully designed by Flaminio Bertoni, was an example of logical simplicity. The key work is a direct extension of this,” says Ary Langbroek, the owner of the Groot Hazebroek farm in Terschuur, where the key course will take place this year. “The progressive design continues to prove itself through its driving characteristics and reliability. If that were not the case, our club members would certainly not use the Traction as often as a regular touring car. When the Traction was introduced in 1934, the completely innovative design was a huge success. Its technical refinement made it a gigantic leap forward for the automotive world at the time.”

23-year-old Lars de Bruin (r.) from Druten says he consciously chooses the club meetings of Traction Avant Nederland. “I studied automotive technology for two years, but ultimately I find tinkering with ‘analogue’ cars from the past much more fun.

Hazebroek points out the self-supporting body, the hydraulic brakes, the independent wheel suspension with torsion bars and front-wheel drive. “You name it. And then there was Bertoni’s amazing Turin design. This combination of technical ingenuity made it possible to create a car with a low center of gravity, plenty of interior space and good handling. Of course there were some teething problems in the beginning, but that happens to today’s cars just as well. The Traction Avant remained a fixture in the sales statistics until 1957, when approximately 750,000 were produced.”

Damned box problem point Traction Avant

Then the question: what exactly are the biggest technical problem areas with the Traction Avant? This initially produces some timid comments: fuel pump, brakes, shift rods, etc. Then comes the sigh that the entire group unanimously shares: that damned gearbox remains the eternal headache.

“The original intention was to equip the Traction Avant with an automatic transmission,” says technical coordinator Ary Langbroek. “There were also problems with that container. The machine was nicknamed Fryer, because it kept bringing the oil to the boil. During a practical test from the factory to the outskirts of Paris, all three cars were stranded. Citroën’s engineers decided on an emergency measure and a three-speed manual transmission was cobbled together in about three weeks, but it had to fit in the housing of the automatic transmission, so that André Citroën would not notice. This gearbox would remain one of the weakest links of the Traction Avant until the end of production.”

This story was previously published in AutoWeek Classics 12-2023