CG is another example of short lived French sportscar companies that nevertheless produced some very attractive models.
CG stands for Chappa and Gessalin, two brothers who already since the thirties had been involved in coach building and set up a new company in 1957. They helped in designing the Alpine A106/108 range, but decided to go their own way in 1964.
They designed a new spider and approached Simca for the mechanics, in this case the drive train of the Simca 1000. This resulted in a very nice, but slightly underpowered car, which was presented in 1966 and dubbed Spider 1000. Production actually took place at the Simca factory.
Performance was not so poor, in spite of having only 40 BHP, but with a kerb weight of only 640 kg, the car was supposed to be able to reach 100 mph. More powerful engines were developed over time but the final A1000 version of the Spider had 49 BHP and could reach 165 kph.
There was also a Coupe version of the 1000S, named Sport 1000. The A1000 versions were discontinued in 1970.
The next CG became the B1200, which had a 1204 cc engine, (from the Simca 1200S Coupe) which produced 80 BHP and turned the ultra light cars into something more challenging. The B1200S entered the market in 1968. Power further increased to 85 BHP in 1970. Some racing variants were also produced, notably a flat spider and a coupe version fitted with a supercharger. These were named “548” after the kerb weight on the homologation papers.
The final version of the CG Coupe was the C1300, which used the 1300 cc engine from the Simca Rallye 2, and with 2 double Webers power increased to a healthy 95 BHP.
As with so many small companies the early seventies proved also to be fatal for CG and production stopped in 1974. Overall it is estimated that 405 cars were made, of which 30 A1000 models, 280 B1200s (including some derivatives) and 95 C1300 models.
Shown here are A1000 Spider which was present at the LeMans Classic in 2006, a 1200 S, which participated in the Tour Auto 2005, and a very rare 1200 S “548” , also in Tour Auto 2005.