At the end of the service, which took place over two days thanks to the kindness of the owner, I made a very demanding statement about the Citroen SM. Namely, that, without taking into account active and passive safety, environmental impact and reliability, characteristics in which today's cars are infinitely superior, I would prefer this coupé to an equivalent modern "3000". Of course, nostalgia and memories undoubtedly play an important role, but this car, thanks also to the extraordinary conditions in which it is kept by its owner, has charm to sell. Naturally, it is a personal and debatable statement, also linked to personal aesthetic tastes and the surprise of driving a fifty-year-old so soft and driven by an engine that surprised me with its character and elasticity. In my opinion, the overflowing and sometimes eccentric personality of these vintage sports flagships (this also applies to the 130 coupé I just tested, and we will soon get into an Alfa Montreal) lies in the fact that they were the product of a small team of passionate and powerful designers, who sought to create their own “masterpiece”, their own legacy to posterity, even by favouring unorthodox and expensive solutions for the company. Of course, even today those who design supercars certainly have passion to spare, but perhaps they find themselves more constrained by the constraints of platforms, costs, marketing choices, etc. Coming to the car, the SM, also known as the Citroen Maserati as it was powered by a 2700 cc from the Modena-based company, seemed so superior to the competition that it should easily defeat them. For a combination of factors, this did not happen, despite boasting technical and stylistic solutions that were years ahead of its rivals, the usual fabulous Citroen road holding and the charisma of the Trident. This engine was made possible by the purchase of Maserati in 1968 by the French company, also with a view to solving the traditional weak point of the “double chevron” cars, namely the old and not very brilliant engines. The factors that mortified it can be summarised in the very high price, the same as a Mercedes 350 SL or a Porsche 911, in a mechanical complexity that sometimes resulted in a lack of reliability, in the oil crisis of 1973 and in the unexpected financial bankruptcy of Citroen, which ended up being acquired by Peugeot, while Maserati was put back on the market. The adventure, which began in 1970 with extraordinary reviews and international awards, including the title of car of the year 1972 in the USA, for the first time in history awarded to a European, effectively ended already in 1973. In the following two years, only a few hundred were built, just to exhaust the orders, at Ligier. Thus, with only 13,000 units produced, the experiment of the first French super sports car of the time faded away. And yet, the SM remains a stone, if not a milestone, certainly an important one in the history of motoring, representing the maximum expression of Citroen's extraordinary originality: if the hydropneumatic suspension or the "Diravi" steering would also be seen in subsequent models, other features would disappear with it, only to reappear thanks to electronics decades later, for example the variable-intensity windshield wipers. The SM was in fact a very sophisticated car thanks only to the mechanical, electrical and pneumatic ingenuity of its designers, given that electronics had yet to come. The super Citroen, with its 220 km/h, the fastest front-wheel drive of the time (the most powerful was the Oldsmobile Toronado), also contributed to dispelling the cliché that all-front cars were unsafe or undriveable beyond a certain limit. I would like to conclude by correcting some errors that I noticed during assembly: the steering turns from side to side are four, not two. I said that the car is shorter in the rear, I obviously meant narrower. I expressed myself badly when I said that French legislation did not allow cars over 2700 cc: I meant that above this displacement, taxes increased significantly (as happened in Italy at the time above 2000 cc). I have some doubts about the veracity of the information that this is the first European with a steering wheel adjustable in height and depth. Claudio Pavanello Visit our website: www.automoto.it Subscribe to the channel: / redazioneautomoto Facebook: / automoto.it Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/automoto_it... Twitter: / automoto_it TikTok: / automotoit Whatsapp: https://bit.ly/47CNr3k