A Grandfather Clock, A 1983 Citroën 2CV, And A Track Record That Nobody Can Take Away

There are track records you chase for years. Lap timers, tire compounds, suspension geometry, the right conditions. And then there are track records that walk up to you in a parking lot in the form of a guy named David carrying a grandfather clock out of a Ford Maverick. You don't plan for those. You just say yes.

That's more or less what happened at the Autopian's first members-only track day at Lime Rock Park, where Jason Torchinsky showed up with his 1983 Citroën 2CV and left with what he's claiming, pretty reasonably, is a certified track record. Specifically: fastest lap ever turned at Lime Rock by a car carrying a grandfather clock. Nobody's checked the official books, but I'd be shocked if this one has competition.

The setup matters here. Citroën had a long, inexplicable tradition of photographing and advertising the 2CV with grandfather clocks loaded inside. Not pocket watches. Grandfather clocks. Tall, ornate, furniture-grade timepieces crammed into one of the smallest, flimsiest cars France ever produced. It was a recurring bit in their marketing, the kind of brand decision that makes complete sense in retrospect because it perfectly captured what the 2CV was actually about. You can put anything in it. It will handle it. It will lean dramatically, but it will not fall over.

David, an Autopian member who deserves recognition by first name only because he absolutely committed to the bit, showed up to the track day having read Torchinsky's writing about this 2CV-and-grandfather-clock tradition and decided to do something about it. He sourced a grandfather clock. He loaded it into his Maverick. He drove it to Lime Rock. If you've ever wondered what separates a great track day from a memorable one, the answer is usually a David.

The clock went into the 2CV. Of course it did. It stuck out through the roof. The 2CV didn't care. That car has been not caring about things since 1948, and the engineering reason for its composure is genuinely interesting if you've never dug into it. The suspension interconnects front to rear through a long horizontal spring system, which means the car leans like a carnival ride but transfers load so progressively that rollover is essentially off the table. Torchinsky was giving passenger rides and letting it lean to the kind of angles that would make a modern crossover's stability control start sending distress signals, and the 2CV just kept going. Clock and all.

He ran the autocross course with it. He did a parade lap on the main circuit. That parade lap, as far as anyone can establish, makes the 2CV the fastest clock-carrying car ever to complete a lap at Lime Rock Park. The reasoning is airtight, in the same way that any record nobody else has tried for is airtight.

I want to be honest that I wasn't there. This is Torchinsky's story and the Autopian's event, and I'm writing about it because it landed in my inbox at about the same time I was thinking about what actually makes a track day worth remembering. Not every great track day story is about the fastest car or the cleanest lap. The Autopian put over 70 people on track at Lime Rock that day, everything from a Renault 4 to a handful of Porsche 911s to what the report describes as a conversion van and a mobile repair shop. That's not a spec sheet. That's a community.

The grandfather clock thing is funny, obviously. But there's something underneath it that I think is worth naming. The 2CV is a car that has absolutely no business being on a road course by any performance metric you want to apply to it. It has somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 horsepower. It weighs next to nothing and is shaped like a tin can someone sat on. It predates the modern concept of active safety by decades. And it's one of the most joyful things you can drive, precisely because none of those metrics tell you anything useful about what it feels like to hustle one through a corner at the limit of its very reachable limits.

That's the whole thesis, isn't it. You don't need a four-figure horsepower number to have the best time at the track. You need the car to respond to you, to put what you're doing with your hands and feet into a language the car answers back in. The 2CV does that. It does it at 45 miles per hour with a grandfather clock hanging out the roof and a passenger trying to figure out whether to laugh or grab the door handle.

After enough cars and enough track days, the ones I remember aren't always the fastest sessions. Some of the sharpest memories I have from road courses are from underpowered, overloaded, or just plain weird machines that forced me to actually drive instead of point and accelerate. The 2CV, from everything I know about it and the people who love them, is that kind of car. It demands engagement and rewards it immediately.

So yes, the record stands. Fastest lap at Lime Rock Park for a car carrying a grandfather clock, set by a 1983 Citroën 2CV with Jason Torchinsky behind the wheel and a piece of antique furniture sticking out the roof. The Autopian has the photos. Nobody's appealing it. And somewhere, a guy named David is driving home in a Maverick, probably smiling, having absolutely nailed what he went there to do.