Mankee Cheng’s Peugeot 106 Rallye 16v

16-valve powered Pug track slag.

PPC’s Mankee Cheng bought his Peugeot 106 S1 Rallye from a local breaker’s yard on the cheap and slightly damaged over three years ago.

In that time, he’s spent countless hours and a whole truckload of beer tokens on restoring it, improving it and fixing it. And then he goes and stuffs it into gravel traps and breaks it on a regular basis at the track days he attends around the country and, indeed, across Europe at Folembray in France and the Nürburgring Nordschleife in Germany.

Mankee’s 106 has been an ongoing project test mule and learning experience for him. When he first got the car, changing a wheels got him in a pickle. Now he’s changing engines, building gearboxes, tuning suspension and generally messing about with cars, especially French ones, on a daily basis.

His Rallye’s original 1.3 engine has been replaced with a more powerful 1.6 16v engine extracted from a Citroën Saxo VTS. As part of the track-biased package, the engine drives through a short-ratio gearbox fitted with a Quaife ATB, which was rebuilt by Mankee’s own fair hands. The car is permanently driven on sticky Yokohama A048R and A032R track-focussed tyres to help stick it to the road.

This year, after a drought of track abuse in the Rallye, Mankee’s winter project is to build a DiY Megasquirt fuel injection and spark management system and strapping it onto the 16v engine sitting in his Rallye’s engine bay, along with fitting a pair of performance camshafts and fiddling about with the mapping on the local bypass.

That’s if the engine starts properly and without bending a lot of expensive stuff.

Mankee's now sold this car and bought a Caterham.